A First Pass On A Novel: The Perpetual Motion Machine

1. My Genesis

I don’t quite like the name “Immortal”. I don’t know if I can’t die. I just know I’m good at living. I mean, I’ve seen so called “Immortals” and I’ve seen said “Immortals” make the transition from immortal to mortal and from there to death. And seeing that they could become mortal, they were never immortal to begin with. They were, as I could be, good at living. And it works the other way too, doesn’t it, if I truly am immortal, I always was and therefore never could have been human, but I feel human. But that makes me ask myself what am I if not human and not immortal. One of the main symptoms of humanity is dying. Human get a hundred years tops and I’ve spent that and then some. But I do have every other symptom of humanity. I have every blessid and blasted symptom there is.



Even the delusion of the inevitable. I once believe that things, some things were impossible. Once believed that humankind would never escape from the earth’s atmosphere. I believed that you couldn’t contact Tokyo in mere seconds. I have seen many an impossible thing in my life and have accepted being an impossible thing.



I, as I said, was always immortal if I am immortal, but before I knew, I was as everyone else was and is. I had parents, Jonathan and Lola Dean; I had a brother, Jack. I had a wife, Jenny and had a divorce. I was normal for a time, than I just wasn’t all of a sudden. I can still remember the morning. June 2, 1948, it was a warm, Tuesday morning. Back then we were living in a small one-bedroom apartment with a restroom and bath, which we shared with the rest of the floor. It would have been unbearable, if it wasn’t for the way the sun hit it in the morning. It was an awe inspiring show that started every morning, first with subtle purples that broke apart the night air, followed gradually by simmering red and faint, gentle oranges and finally the room would flood from ceiling to floor with warm golden yellow.



Jenny and I had been married for about six months and every morning for those six months; I’d wake up about twenty minutes to half an hour before her. I’d wake up early just to watch her sleep. Just to watch her breathe, to watch her be. I had been with her for a while and was amazed to find myself overwhelmed by her. I was overwhelmed by the mere fact that she chose me, that she would care about someone like me. I’d was and probably will never be accused of being good looking, I got a dirty look to me, like I’m forever just getting out of the coal mines and ever since I was sixteen, I looked ten years older than I ought to. But I’m honest and a talker, but I never would have thought that all the talk in the world could get a girl like her.



A girl that could make you forget the world was going to end with one kiss, a girl with eyes like a full moon on a warm summer’s night. She was a little like a force of nature, all knowing, and all encompassing and she was as gentle as a breeze. She could calm the fires of hell with a word. But I did, I got her and I married her.



You see my brother and I got jobs at a car parts factory when my father died. I had to quit college to help our mother keep the family house. But one day, I got careless around an axial press and well; two slabs of metal don’t always play nicely with the hands that operate them. My entire arm was shaking and I almost blacked out from the pain, but I could still feel everything. That had to be a good sign. But as Jackie raced me to the hospital, screaming “You’ll be fine, Matt,” over the thunderous throbbing in my head, I slowly felt my hand and part of my forearm go numb. I peered down at my hand, it looked like a pile of wet, shredded meat and crushed bone, and then I prepared myself for what I knew I was going to hear. That they were going to amputate. That I was going to have to live life with one hand. But when I got to the emergency room and was seen by the doctor, he said he had seen worse in the war and that he’d be able to save it, but I’d have some pain for the rest of my life (he had no idea how true that was,) and the nurse assisting him was Jenny. She looked stunning although it was obvious that she was tired and grumpy.



She walked in, looking like she was about to clock the next person to talk to her and glistening with sweat. She gave a look at the doctor and then at me and I swear I completely forgot I had a damn hand. She had these big, powerfully brown eyes. That was the first time I saw her and the first time I was sure of anything. I was sure I’d marry her and I did. Every day I thought of her and every morning I got to fall back in love with her. But on that particular morning so long ago, I awoke, turned to her, brushed the silky brown hair from her face, peered into her contented face, and felt nothing.



I couldn’t quite explain it, but I felt static and cold. I felt complete indifference, I spend that day, not thinking of her, but thinking about the absence of my love for her and it doesn’t make sense now, but then I grew spiteful. I got this idea in my head that she must have done something that I was somehow picking up on. I wanted so badly to go back to a good morning and it killed me that I couldn’t. So I chose to numb what I couldn’t fix. I drank and I drank a lot. I drank her to tears, us into poverty, and right into the night that ended it all.



It was late, about one or two in the morning and I came home to chaos. Boxes and clothing were scattered over chairs and tables as Jenny and her two brother were flying about the house gathering her things and this isn’t me making an excuse but I was drunk and everyone was moving so fast tearing down our newly sprouted marriage and I just wanted answers, which no one wanted to give. So I grabbed Jenny by the wrist, refused to let go until she spoke to me and she looked at me with terribly wide eyes, and said in a trembling voice, “I’m leaving”. Let go of me.” Those words echoed in my head and I could tell that I was distant and foreign to her and I hated her for it. More than I hated anything, but just for a moment. But in that moment, I smacked her.



Now I never laid an unkind hand on her before that night but that simple contact of flesh against flesh made sure that she hated me as much as I did her in that moment. She walked out the door, leaving her two brothers to kick the crap out of me. She called the house the next morning to cement what I already assumed. She was leaving me and I give her nothing but venom, nothing but worst my mind could fathom. I, to this day, can’t explain my reasoning, but I needed her to hate me.



That day, I slept in late, skipped work and ignored Jackie’s urgings at my front door. I didn’t feel like being around people, but when the phone rang, I somehow knew to answer it.

“Hello.”

“Matt?” Her voice was faint and strained, like she had been crying.

“Yeah, Jenny.” My finger trembled slightly as I tried to cool my nerve. “What do you want?”

“There’s going to be a lawyer…”

“You and your lawyer can go fuck yourselves.” I interrupted. My arm kept blocking the signals from my brain. It kept the phone pressed to my ear no matter how much I wanted it to slam the phone down. I was screaming inside, felt myself breathing smoke and fire. I felt tar bubble off my lips. I felt fangs.

“He’s going to come with some paper that you need to sign, Okay. Matt.”

“Well, you and who ever you’re fucking can burn it hell.” I wanted that to be that. I wanted to slam the phone down, sign the fuckiing paper, and be done with it, but the phone stayed pressed against my ear.

“Why do you think that? What happened to you?”

“I don’t know what it is about you, Jen. It wasn’t a look you gave me, or something you did or said. But something told me, you are a fucking whore and I have no need for you anymore.” I said in the coldest and most indifferent voice I could muster. My arm finally submitted. I laid the phone down on the cradle.



I only truly realize how different I was, when someone tried to kill me. It was 1952; I was penny-less and desperate. Years of drinking don’t come cheap. But I thought I had an out. A small time Loan shark named Tony. He had money and a couple guys on hand but he was still small time. I had a feeling in my gut that my luck was going to turn around. I had an odd sort of certainty that I could finally go back. So I go to him and ask for a grand



So I get on a bus to Vegas and as the New Mexican sun slowly sank, bathing the horizon in a heated red I thought to myself ‘Today I win.’ I watched the world speed past my window seat and I felt the sickness that had welled in my stomach wash away. I felt optimism, more than I had felt in a long time. I thought back to Tony, him sitting behind his over-sized desk, trying like hell to look powerful and intimidating, but in reality, he looked boyish. He was thin and lanky. His face was long and toned and betrayed no sign of whiskers. He eyed me thoughtfully, betraying noticeable detest at my moth-eaten suit in comparison to his stylish, black pin striped one. “Fine.” He said after a long pause. He reached into his breast pocket and pulled a key out and then reached down to a bottom drear. He slide it open and his hand re appeared with a neatly folded bundle of cash and a leather bound notebook. He opened the book and wrote ‘M. Dean – 1000.’ He looked up at me and said calmly “You’re in my book Matt. Don’t be stupid and forget that.”



The Bus crept to a stop and I speared no time before heading to the Casino with the brightest lights on the strip. The Good Heart, it oozed with red carpet, old women and recycled air. It felt alive and buzzing, every table looked open and welcoming, and the only problem in the world was in the choosing. I eventually settled on a petite blonde dealer at the Black Jack table and I was on a roll. A little money here on craps, a little money there on Poker and I got so much back, until I walked up to the Roulette table. I remember that I had bet it all on 15 black. The ball dropped on 18 red. I stood frozen to the spot for a long time, not speaking, not thinking, and barely breathing.



The dealer asked me to walk away from the table if I wasn’t betting. So I did and I found a new spot in front of a slot machine in between a muttering, possibly crazed eighty-year-old woman and a heavyset man with poor hygiene and respiratory problems and metaphorically speaking, it’d seem this is where all problems go to rest their bones. No one seemed to pay me any attention here, so it seemed the best place to think. So I was 1,000 dollars in debt to a Loan shark (plus the interest, which made it more like 1500 dollars), pretending to gamble so the waitresses would still give me free drinks and trying to resist the hypnotic glow of the neon and the excited babble of slot machines enough to contemplate how screwed I was.



Although, to my best efforts I tried to look like I was gambling and to my best belief, I thought I was biding my time until I could think of a way out of my predicament, in reality I was just patiently waiting to be shot in the gut by some stony faced stranger hired by Tony after he had found out that I couldn’t pay.



It didn’t take them that long to come for me though. I guess Tony knew I couldn’t pay before I did. They came, I ran, they caught me and wrenched me from the safety of prying eyes and into the back seat of their car.



2. There’s Monsters out there



I remember that car ride more than I remember anything else. I remember it was a Black Cadillac with leather seats. It smelt like new leather, straight off the cow’s ass. I guess the color suited the occasion; I liken that car ride to my funeral. Although I didn’t die, I was buried and I rested in a fashion. They both wore immaculate black suits, although the larger of the two seemed to be wedged uncomfortably into his. They never gave me their names. Assassins and hired killers seldom do. The bigger one never spoke. He didn’t quite need to. The fierce some nature of his size and face spoke volumes. He had a face, like stone. Hard like stone, big and round and stern. He never flinched, frowned, smiled or attempted any facial expression.



But the smaller one did speak and did show emotion and seemed more human. He had greasy black hair and the hint of age around his eyes and mouth. He moved his fingers through his hair almost mindlessly before he turned from the front seat to look at me; he chewed on his gums and then began to speak. He spoke with a dried out, irritated tone, like a sick person speaking his last words to unworthy ears.

“Can I ask you something?” He said, looking at me as if he actually wanted permission. But he didn’t wait for it.

“Do you believe in fate? Tony does. Twenty minutes. It took Tony twenty minutes to call us after meeting with you.”

I remember a big heavy something blocking my throat, stopping me from uttering a plea for more time or for mercy.

“I ask because Tony could have been wrong about you. You could have had the money ready and waiting and then we would’ve had to leave you be. Well, if we were dishonest men we could’ve killed you anyway and been $1000 richer.” He omitted a light chuckle. But assuming we’re honest men, Tony would have had to find a new candidate. You see, my friend and myself are not just killing a worthless, deadbeat drunk. We’re making a statement. We’re going to beat you, stab you, shoot you – Basically be heartless monsters tonight and Tony, who is waiting for us…” He said checking his watch “…will cut out your tongue, and you’ll be such an awful sight that the paper will refuse to print the gory details of you. You will make Tony into a monster. Someone no one will want to fuck over and at the same time you will mark him a man who can and will take care of his business.” He removed a cigar from his suit jacket and lit it, before taking a long drag on it. “We got a lot to accomplish it one night.”



They drove me out into the moonlit desert, where another car sat idling, and its headlights blazing a clear work area. The large one snatched me by the collar and wrenched me from the backseat of the Cadillac. It started from there. A sudden and overzealous kick to the ribs, which was immediately followed by the unmistakable sound of bones shattering. From there they smacked me around quite a bit. I’m pretty sure the bigger one had his heart set on me staying awake for the entire ordeal because he’d kept stopping to smack me awake. But they stayed true to their word. They beat and tortured me until the only sound I could make was the sound of gurgles as I struggled to breathe and finally the small one buried a shotgun shell into the depths of my chest. Let me tell you something, they say a broken heart is the worst pain you’ll ever feel, well I’d have to disagree with that.



While I was still retched blood and trying to hold my insides in, they dragged me into a shallow grave and the door to the other car finally opened and out came Tony. He looked rather sleek and elegant, oddly fair faced, as if he was going or had been at the opera. His blonde hair was neatly and handsomely styled, making him seem even younger than he might’ve been. But also, he looked cold. It almost seemed as if he floated to my side, like some prep school Grim Reaper. He knelt down and looked me in the eyes. They were cold as ice. As if, he wasn’t human but something else. Tony allowed his hand to hang in mid air awaiting something. The larger one snatched a bloodstained pocketknife from the desert floor and handed it to Tony. Tony then pushed down my lower lip and jaw, stuck two fingers and a thumb into my mouth, and grasped my tongue. I tried to bite and to kick but pain and fatigue sat heavy on my chest. But that wasn’t all. It wasn’t just the fear and pain and fatigue, it was the hopelessness. I knew and had accepted the fact that I was going to die. I let tears fall freely as I babbled incoherently.



Tony wrenched my tongue out a good three or four inches out of my head before he started to saw through it. As hot blood splashed on to my cheeks and down my nostrils, I lost my sight or my eyes just rolled into the back of my head (I couldn’t be sure) and the world became the taste of salt and metal and then that faded away into nothing but pain and pressure and then the pressure stopped and left me with only the horrible pain. I could feel them throw heaps of dirt on me, before leaving me to the cold. The worst of it was the cold. I remember how my body started to lose heat. I remember the cold as if I’m still in that grave. I would have welcomed death but death did not come. I at one point thought I was dead but I was actually just sleeping. I slept for what felt like days, weeks, and months. But I awoke again and coughed up a good amount of dirt and bit more out of every other orifice. When you feel the cool, calm silence of death creep over you, you experience true peace. An infinite peace without any concern or fear. I severely mourned that loss; I wanted that peace with all of my being, but knew it would only occur once. I rose from my grave and slid a finger across the unbroken flesh upon my chest. The wind kicked up dust and chilled my cheeks. The horizon was laced with rippling gold as the sun prepared to rise. It slowly soaked the air, the earth, the world with life and it breathed warm light into my chilled lungs. I wasn’t dead, I could breathe. I could see. I could think and I could hear the distant freeway and the town 20 miles away, the people in that town their heartbeats, their thoughts. The world was so noisy all of a sudden.



The acuteness of my hearing dulled quickly and muscles grew stronger. There was an energy that now flowed through my body, intensifying individual components. An electric sensation coursing through my veins. I remember the power I felt, the sheer greatness of my being. The knowledge of being something more. I knew I wasn’t quite human. I didn’t know what I was though. I have a closer idea now from the people I’ve encountered, the things I’ve seen. But I thought I was God then. I thought myself untouchable. I did things... regrettable things... truly regrettable things.



I felt at that time that humanity was fodder for my rage and desire. But these things could be one day mended or could it, or should it. If I undo my sins, I become guilty of no sin. I give myself the right to be good, whether or not I deserve it. I remember such horrible things, I remember the hatred, the rage and I remember the sand, and I remembered how the sand clung to my flesh and submitted to my weight. I smelt the clean but slightly salty air. I remember most of all the feeling of sand between my toes. One of my executioners had taken my shoes for whatever reason he wanted them. I walk through the desert, back to the city and from the city; I traveled back home to Red River, New Mexico. I knew only rage and vengeance. I knew only the pain of a shotgun shell in my chest and at the time that was all I needed to know.



I remember the night of my guilt’s origin. I remember standing outside of Tony’s two-story home, it was surprisingly domestic. I had assumed he’d surround himself completely with gaudy pieces of shit, but he had a fairly humble and respectable home, a sensible car, and even a well-groomed golden shepherd.



An overwhelming display of the American dream. The only clue towards his sinister nature was a black car parked across the street from his house. Inside sat my two executors and a third man I’ve never seen before. They puffed on cigars and joked with each. I stood far off in the shadows of a neighboring home, waiting for my opening with hot poison pumping through my veins and my damn veins screamed for action. They swelled and ached and ultimately forced me to give in.



I picked up a loose brick from the home’s walkway, marched to the passenger’s side of the car, and smashed the window. The larger of my two executors shrieked as the glass cut at his face and eyes. The shorter of them erupted out of the driver’s side banishing a small handgun. I waited for him to recognize my face. To see my living, livid eyes burning like all unholy hell. It took a few seconds but he did and his face went milk white. Something clicked in his mind and he ran, but before he could get too far, I hurled the brick with an ungodly strength and it hit with a terrible crack on the back of his head and he fell and didn’t get back up. The larger executor fell from the passenger seat, still liberating tiny bit of glass from his face as the man in the backseat sat uselessly, gazing stupidly at what just unfolded like it was an overly complex puzzle. With his eyes only partly open, the larger man attempted to rise to meet me, but I give him a quick and precise kick in between his shoulders, which didn’t knock him down but did slow his progress upward. And for a short time, the contest was my wrath pit against my bulk. I’d thrust my wicked heel into his crumbling ribs, hacking away until his collapsed, panting and coughing blood and there I silenced the aching of his body, by shoving my heel into his skull and he laid there like a beaten mountain on the verge of breaking into billions of tiny pebbles. And the third still sat there, blank faced, but I killed him the same, with the small one’s pistol.



Then there was the family. You’d imagine that such an act would be fiercely imprinted in the mind of the actor, every action every turn memorized and readily recalled, but I don’t remember or don’t want to remember some of those actions. But that doesn’t mean I don’t remember the action of murder, you don’t forget that sort of thing. The first murder happened in the kitchen, I believe the wife. She screamed, fought, and made enough of a racket that the rest of the house was awake. I held her there poised and ready to snap her neck. I remember Tony was there, a small handgun shivering in his hands. He kept shouting threats of how he was going to castrate me, how he was going to burn down my home, how he was going to murder my family. Oh… that’s right. I had a conversation with him first. I knocked on his door and the Mrs. answered it. She wore a red nightgown under a silky white robe.

“Hello, I apologize for the late hour, Ma’am. Could I speak with Tony? It’s related to his business.”

She eyed me irritably and said “One moment.”

Moments later, I sat across from Tony, him looking sour faced. “I’m surprised you’re alive.”

“I’m surprised too.” I replied flatly. I rolled my tongue over a grain of sand still in my mouth I had been splitting them out for the past five hours.

“I suppose it was fair. I fuck you over, you fuck me over. You went a little over board but I get the reasoning.”

“And you get why I’m upset. I paid good money for you to be dead. Those boys don’t come cheap. But here you are, looking better than ever. How odd is that one.”

He then stood up and turned to face the ocean blue kitchen counter.

“You know how much I paid. I gave them both $750 a piece and told them to seat on it until I find a guy, you.” He said turning around and point at me. “That plus the grand you lost and the $500 in interest, you’ve turned what was a good plan into a very expensive mistake.”

“You have no clue how expensive it really is. I'm nowhere near done taking.”

“What? You want money or something?”

“Not quite.”

Tony then turned around again and opened a cabinet and before I could think, a bullet lodged itself into my head and I black out. I awoke a few moments later to see Tony’s wife hovering over me. She probably heard the gunshot and came to see what was going on. I snatched her by the throat and in a flash, I was behind her.



Then it’s us standing, us shouting. Him training his handgun’s sights on me. And me poised and ready to snap her neck like a twig.



Next, it’s her lying dead on the floor. His eyes, the big payoff, his eyes swelled with tears and you could tell without being under his skin that every nerve in his body had gone numb. You could tell without knowing him that she was everything to him. He dropped his gun and allowed me to kill him.



Next was the eldest son. He was no more than 16, but the way he fearlessly charged into the downstairs living area. “Mom!” He shouted in a panic and then he saw me and we stood there and nothing mattered. He looked at me with so much fear and rage and horror and confusion and everything must have melted into nothingness for him. I could felt his heart break. I could feel his blood boil and scream for vengeance. I could feel his muscle plan an attack independent of his mind. And I could see how far away his mind had gone; it couldn’t possibly make sense of what it just saw. He should have gotten some form of vengeance. I stole a quick glance at the handsome knife set displayed on the counter. Five polished ivory handles stood proudly upon an expertly curved wooden base.



Next I pocketed the fingers I had just taken from a confused sixteen-year-old. The owner lay spread-eagle on the floor, his insides flooding onto the expensive kitchen tiles. I could just hear the terrified breathing of a young girl. Her heart pounding like a jackhammer. I could taste her fear, almost hear her think ‘should I run or should I hide.' She must have decided to hide.



Next I had her by the neck. She was no more than thirteen and she had her mother’s features already. I remembered how I focused on her hair. The way it felt, like smooth silk after being run through water. I remember refocusing on her neck, the way it quivered and warmed my flesh. I remember feeling the faintest quiver in my loins and was relieved to feel disgusted with myself. I felt the disgust but the thought still lingered in my head. It sat there mocking me, screaming to the world that I was no better than Tony. I was not only no better, I was worse. I felt immense, immeasurable disgust and guilt and I desperately fought to kill the thought but there it stayed. It was in my head, my arms, my hands, it was in my groin and I kept screaming into the bowels of my mind “Let her go! Kill her! Just don’t, please don’t become that.” But I leave that thought there, in the icy black urgings of my guilty past.



And with longevity is the condition of living in the present. I with all honesty regret my past, but I move forward. But this is in contrast to my intention. My being wills me forward, whilst my intention wills me into the past. It causes severe tear inside of me. It gets to be unbearable. This constant separation between duty and desire, but all I can do is move forward, moving ever closer to my duty.





3. A New Companion



I hadn’t been here in so long. I could still smell it. The rusty metal aroma of blood, the saltwater misty scent of fear, the paint and cleaning agents couldn’t hide it from me. I stood in their kitchen and I fought off the memories of Tony and the look in his eyes, the terrible heartbreak and iced over indifference and hopelessness. So long ago, I came here, so long ago from her screaming and I still couldn’t bring myself to go up the carpeted steps to her room, where the ghost of that girl sat in waiting. Her eyes flooding with pleading, flooding with horror.



Tony Cappetairo’s home had been sold and re-sold, painted a rainbow of different colors, the tiles tore up, a new room added on, but it remembered me well and reacted accordingly. It shrank back and shuttered, like a helpless animal too tired to scream. I could feel it wanting to eject me from inside it. Wanting to vomit me out, like bad fish. I sat down on the carpeted floor. The house was empty, less warm, less healthy. The new owners would be moving in, in a week. I wondered if they knew the home’s history.



I tried to remember why I chose that day to re-visit the house, but I couldn’t come up with a reason better than it felt right. I had been doing that, learning to bide my time with feeling rather than logic. I’d move from town to town, from person to person, strictly listening to whims. They seemed to guide me well. They kept me away from trouble and away from prying eyes interested in a dead man. But it was odd that they would lead me to an empty home with such horrible memories embedded in its wall. I looked down at the blue-green carpet; it was a sort of amber-brown way back when. I liked that old brown carpet. I ran my fingers through its short hairs and started pulling up little strands of carpet fiber to distract myself. ‘What am I waiting for?’ I thought to myself, pulling up a more difficult piece.

“Do you believe in Fate?” The question hung in the air and expanded somehow; like it was the most important question I’d ever be asked, filling the room with its simplistic importance. The voice sounded familiar, for a moment I thought it might have been Jackie, but that was ridiculous. I twisted around to see him, the smaller man who ushered me into the miserable state of waiting. I never did get his name. He looked worn and dried, not quite old, but not quite alive.

“I asked you that a long time ago.” He said through cracked lips that reminded me of crumbling stones.

“50 years and two caved-in skulls ago” I said still seated. I thought to ask why was he still alive but I stopped myself. I’d think the same way as I, although it appeared that the years had been better to me. He lost his immaculate look and seemed to have gained an odd aura, like a fraying rope. A whole slowly falling away from itself.



“I suppose it was fair that you did what you did.” He said turning his head to reveal a crusted over crack on the back over his head. I crept back in disgust. His black hair was matted and clumped together with blood and dirt.

“I suppose, it wouldn’t be fair for me to seek revenge for this and I won’t if you let me die.”

I didn’t quite understand what he meant. He looked at me as if he was expecting me to do something, pull a rabbit out of my ass, maybe.

“I don’t understand.”

“You ever had a migraine for 50 years. Well, as one would imagine it leaves you with very little patience. I’m tired, I’m in pain and I with you to stop it.” He said venomously, his body shook in a subtle and foreboding way.

“I don’t know what I can do. I don’t…”

“ I am tired, I hurt all the damn time and I promise you this, if you don’t fix me, let me die, I will make you pray for the joys of the treatment you got in the desert.” He said this slowly, in an ‘I’m curling up to strike’ kind of way.

“I didn’t…” I started but he pulled a handsomely polished piece of sharp silver from his pocket and said with a tremor in his voice. “Choose your words carefully.”



I hopped to my feet and he must have taken that as a threatening gesture because he tackled me to the ground and started to stab me in the chest and neck. I raised my arm in defense, which got stabbed a couple times as well, before I blacked out.

The Cold



I awake, uncertain of where I was but it couldn’t have been to long since I’d blacked out because I could still feel blood trickling down my shirtfront. I couldn’t see though, I for a moment thought I had gone blind. But I could just manage a small source of light, a short strip of faint yellow, and then there was the cold. It sank into my throat and lungs and stung them both. And it was chased by a dirty taste like old meat or expired milk.

“Hello?” I called out.



The Crowbar

I tried to raise my numb arms only to find them restrained. Suddenly the faint yellow exploded into dazzling light, dulled only by a figure, wielding a foreboding hooked instrument. He entered and with a click, the room was flooded with light. The walls were gray and covered with frost. I couldn’t find what was causing the dirty smell but I figured it was once human and then I looked at him. He had a broken look in his eye, not broken as in beaten, but broken as in desperate, like an injured elk being circled by wolves more dangerous than ever. He looked like he was going to say something as he approached me but he opted to bash my face with the blunt end of the crowbar.



“Do it!” He yelled as he swung the metal. I could feel his expertise with each blow. Some people would just use their strong arm and swing away. The problem with that is you get tired and can hurt your wrist, then what good are you. But not him, he knew to swing just hard enough to hurt me and he knew where to hit. Across the shins, across the cheekbones, nowhere meaty, nowhere that’d keep me dazed for too long.

He had slammed the crowbar into my collarbone and left me to recover for the next dosage of his wrath, which came in the form of his glinting silver.



The Knife

I expected him to stab wildly, like before, but he just stood there, almost making cuts, almost slashing, but always almost. He was searching for something and within moments, he found it. The crowbar had left large bruised areas around my face and body; he had apparently been looking for a spot that wasn’t black or purple. He had succeeded in finding it, on my left forearm and dipped the knife below my skin and kept pressing down into the meat of my arm. The blade made a slow and constant path into me. He started to twist the knife even slower than he pushed it in. The wound started to rip apart, spilling blood down on to the floor. I wanted to scream out, but only managed a gasping whimper like a beaten dog. He took his hand off the blade of the knife and it stood independent of him. He placed his hand back on the knife and started shaking it and finally pulled it out, only to plunge it back into my arm. He repeated this three or four more times on various parts of my body before he pulled the blade out for the last time. I closed my eyes and dropped my head, when I heard the sound of flint sparking and the wild rush of burning gas.



The Blowtorch

Fire, that was all that was on my mind. I forgot my burden for the hour or so that I had sat shackled to a chair and screaming in that Freezer as that sadistic son of a bitch melted off chunks of skin and fat from my shoulder.



“How far do you think I’ll have to go to leave some permanent damage?”



The hiss of the blowtorch was constantly muted by my screams, but beyond my bitter cries and the hissing were his screams. At this` time, I realized this was both sadism and masochism at the same time. Hell on both of us.



The air stank of flesh and smoke and clouded any hopes of clear thought. But I thought I could see the humanity in my personal monster, he for a mere second showed his guilt and need for hope and I understood that if he had not a choice, he’d put himself on the other end of the blowtorch, on the other end of those knives and crowbars.



“I’ve got something special for you. … Something real good… You’ll love this. I’ve always wanted to know what happens in the case of… um... Dismemberment no... . Um decap... No …oh! Amputation! Amputation! What’ll happen in case of amputation? Skin fibers weave back together; what if there’s nothing to weave back? Huh…huh….You’re still immortal… flesh still regenerates. Will I have two of you or does it have to be connected to the heart or... Maybe the brain.” He said with one of his fingers pressed to his head.





He eyed me as if he had just revealed a secret. He then marched away from me and disappeared behind a corner. The next thing I heard was the whine of a chainsaw. He reappeared and marched wide –eyed toward me. I pleaded with a hoarse and useless voice. The words dropped from my mouth and hit the floor, but I moved my mouth all the same. He hovered the rotating blade just above my left forearm. I couldn’t feel the torch, but I’d definitely feel this. He slowly pressed down. The blade tore my skin like paper, flinging particles of meat and blood all over the room, and within seconds he hit bone and the saw started to whine louder. I started to scream louder as well. I screamed out what was left in my lungs and it still wasn’t enough. I prayed for death or at least for the pain to overwhelm me. Neither happened.

But something did. I found my voice and shouted out. “I’ll do it!” My throat burned like I had swallowed acid.

‘What the hell was I saying?’ I couldn’t tell how I’d do it, or if it could be done, but his hope would restrain him. “I’ll do it.” He looked at me skeptical, but his eyes betrayed his doubt.

“You will. How?”

“I have to do it.”

“How?!”

“I have to kill you.”

His eyes widen in an understanding that I couldn’t fathom. If nature couldn’t kill hum how could I. He hurriedly undid my restraints, tenderly and gingerly handling my destroyed body, holding me like a baby ready to walk. I couldn’t quite stand, but I fought to pump adrenaline and dopamine into my veins. Once I did whatever I was to do, I'd have to try and make an escape. He then handed a silver knife with his hands shaking like it was over pumped with waiting and excitement. It felt cold and sure in my right hand.



His eyes welled with tears and his cheeks started to bloom with hot red hope. I spread my arms in a gesture like a hug, which he slowly entered. He held me tightly, squeezing and bruising bruised, broken and burnt areas and began to weep openly into my shoulder and I closed my eyes and tried to shoo away the terrible, electric ecstasy of the thrill of a ready kill, the want for a wanting victim. I felt the metal warm and rejoice in my hand and with a low breath, I plunged the blade into his lower back, hoping to hit his kidney. I think it hit.



He fell out of my arms to the ground. He gave me a look that disgusted me, a look that said “Thank you for killing me”. His eyes swelled with joy and gratitude .He knew he was going to die and was glad. He reached back and pulled the knife out and let his steaming inside flood out on to the frost-covered floor. His eyes fluttered and faded in and out of focus and he winced and his eyes welled up, but he never lost that look of gratitude.



I knew I had to leave but something told me it was wrong to let him die alone. So I dragged him out of the hell he’d created for us and into the hallway of a diner that seemed to be under remodeling. Its walls were half-painted powder blue. I let him rest there, propped up against the wall, for a while, so I could rest. I crouched down and closed my eyes. All I could think of was how every part of me hurt. Then how odd it felt, to have blood on my hand again. I had kept red off of it for so long. So long that I almost forgot that they could be stained.



I rubbed off what I could on my coat, hoping to undo what had happened. But then I calmed myself and tried to breathe and I did. I sucked in the back draft of the industrial freezer and thought about how good the breeze from the freezer felt. I closed my eyes to better enjoy the icy cold and to better allow the cold bless me with sleep.



I then woke with a start to see my bleeding companion, coughing up blood and hunched over on himself. Slowly laying himself on the ground. “Talk to me.” He said, resting his head on his bicep.

“About what?” I asked

“Anything”

I stared off into space trying to think through my aching nerves and Jenny’s face floated to the surface.

“I just recently found out that I have a son, who has kids of his own.”

“You’re a grandfather.”

“Yeah. I’d be about eighty-five.”

“You look good for your age.”

“Yeah,” I chuckled and then winced, inadvertently moving broken and bruised tissue. “My son, who I never met, was fifty-two when he died, heart failure. His name was Harry Bowland, but he had a son and two girls and my wife, my ex-wife died too. On her eighty-third birthday.”

I stopped to think of her. Back when she was young and the last time I saw her, with thousands of tubes running in and out of her nose and arms and every other place you could put a damn tube. “I thought I got rid of you’ She joked. I didn’t know exactly why she didn’t react in confusion or horror, but she didn’t. The last time we were in the same room was a long time ago at my divorce hearing. She just gave me this ‘I was waiting for you to come”



“I wanted to see her once more. I needed to know exactly what became of her.

I barely knew her though. She has restarted her life. She had had a new husband and a child. She has had a career, has had vacations, and has had the headaches of a teenager all without me. She has had an entire life happily without me.” I took my gaze away from the poor little bleeder across from me. I didn’t want to talk anymore, but I figured I’d want a kind voice if I ever died.



“You look so much like you did. But you look so sad. Why?’ She asked me. She placed her hand upon my cheek and she smiled at me. I had to say, she looked so different. Her skin sagged some and her fingers trembled upon my flesh. She was so old and I couldn’t help but…’ The word danced on the tip of my tongue, not quite ready to be spoken. ‘Envy her and … mourn her. But I found that no matter how old she got she could still break through my barriers and get to the real me. My eyes swelled with tears and I lost all strength and control. I buried my head in her bosom and cried.” A tear escaped the rim of my eye and rolled down my cheek.



“I missed you so much. I’m so sorry.’ It poured from me, like a waterfall and it both sting and rang sweet in my mouth, and there it was. So crystal clear I felt foolish that I hadn’t seen it before. I could love her. It had returned sometime in between her leaving and me entering the hospital room. I let the whole of 50 some odd years out with my tears and pleas for forgiveness. I held on to her and that moment and every single moment of our marriage so long ago.”



“It was amazing; we began to just talk. We spoke of the time we spent apart, of the time we spent together, of my experiences, of her family and that night she walked out.”



“You were gone long before I divorced you. I couldn’t do it anymore”

I found myself crying full out, not from pain and not from fear. I looked back at my new friend and he looked right into my eyes and he mouthed something I couldn't quite understand, before his eyes went blank.







4. Little did they Know



We cruised along a rain soaked highway, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Arizona. It had been wildly hot throughout the day and the sudden rain was at first, a welcomed surprise, dropping the heat by at least 25 percent. But as we drove through the rain and night fell, the continuous static of the rain left us sluggish. I had agreed to come along to relieve Chris of some of the driving responsibilities, a decision I was beginning to regret. In part, because of the endless stretches of in- activity and in part, because of the fact that I had never felt so foreign and out of place in my life. I had stupidly thrust myself into a sea of wavy brown hair and fiery hazel eyes. There was Chris, who was a year older than me and very well built. I always likened him to a machine, in that he didn’t like being unfocused or out of control. Then there was Mya, she was sixteen and almost took the plane trip with her parent. She apparently never expressed a want to go by either means of transportation. I couldn’t blame her, no one likes going to funerals. But apparently she chose the less immediate route. And lastly there was Vicky, who was twenty-two, my age.



But I also regretted it, mostly because of the fear of being found out. I had elected to spend 20 hour with the brother of the girl I was secretly dating. I had offered for the experience, for the doing of it. I thought, how great would it be to see the desert, the cracked sand, the endless and the reddish green horizon. To taste the unfettered air, and even better; to experience that with my best friend of ten years and the girl who had my heart, a cheap adventure. We were driving from North Beach, California to their grandmother’s funeral in Red river, New Mexico. It was about 20 hours one way and Vicky and Mya didn’t manage to make it pass the 7th hour and you couldn’t really blame them. Chris and I weren’t doing much better.



I sat in my seat, feeling half-dead and completely exhausted, my eyes fixed securely on the mock oak panel dash. Studying the thousands of ignored stains and tiny bits of garbage that commonly plague a college student’s car. Sometime around the 6th hour, I forgot where I ended and the old cracked leather of the seat began, around the eighth, I couldn’t muster the energy to care. I knew I had to take over the driving responsibilities soon but I couldn’t help but nod off. I blinked in and out of consciousness, hypnotized by the rhythmic cadence of the girl’s breathing and the falling rain. I wouldn’t make the night and I could see Chris pretending to be fully aware. His head would start to bob and he’d let the car drift ever so slightly but quickly correct the car’s path and at about the fourth near miss I raised my head and saw it. We arrived upon it like a divine beacon. A gaudy neon sign reading Moe’s Motel: Vacancies. It was a one-story cement building cloaked in lazily sprawling darkness. The motel had about eleven of twelve rooms and only one seemed to be occupied. I nudged Chris and said “Let’s stop, we’re two hours ahead of schedule,” He gave me a look like he would rather keep going, but knew he wouldn’t make it. He gave an irritated sigh and changed lanes, readying the sedan to pull into the parking lot.



After stirring Mya and Vicky, we made our way to the check in window. It’s light spilling out into the night, but somehow managing to leave the shadows perfectly undisturbed. The darks stayed dark and the yellow light from the check out window was loosing ground every moment. A dying pathway to a lonely window. I tapped on the bell and after a few moments of odd rustling we were met by this wild-eyed, wiry haired, old man sporting a dirty beat-up, old, cowboy hat with the initials TP embroidered in black thread off to the side. He eyed the four of us and then pulled out a large red register book to check us in. I couldn’t help but think of how he stank of bad food and good Bourbon and it looked like the aforementioned had found its way down his shirt. He thoughtfully gazed at Chris, who was serving a leaning post for both his sisters, and said “You boys have fun now.” with a tip of his hat that suggested “Good job, boys” and a toothy grin, revealing yellowed teeth and what looked like chewing tobacco, but could have been just about anything. Chris gave a look like he wanted to correct the motel man’s assumption, but opted to just take the room key, while shooting the man a dirty look like Chris had just lick an ashtray. The motel man returned the look by swirling his tongue under his lips in a ‘You got something to say?’ type of fashion.



Next, we were settling into the room. Vicky and Mya graciously took the bed, a clean enough queen size with a thin, dark blue blanket, while Chris took an armchair that I declined for fear of tetanus. It looked ratty and was wrapped up in duct tape and it looked old, (no, it was old in the 70’s, it was a dinosaur.) Someone, I assumed the old man, had stopped caring about presentation a long while back. The room was clean, but there was a strong indication that the previous occupants weren’t.



You’d look around and spot an orange tinge of old spilled blood against the white backdrop of the wall or you’d see a darkened corner that probably became a hilarious story of how someone couldn’t hold their bowels in some ratty motel in Arizona. I looked around and saw little scratches and scuffs scattered across the walls and ceiling from my make shift floor bed. I played with the idea of waking everyone up to add to the chaos of this room. I for some reason thought of the room as a traveler permanently cemented into the ground, but somehow it managed to get souvenirs from the people who pass through it. I decided against waking up Chris and the girls due to the nature of the trip. But I still wanted to offer something to this room. I grabbed a black Sharpie marker out from my bag and added five words to the inside wall of the closet: Rest in Peace Nana Dean.



I closed my eyes and tried to envision her. She appeared in my mind’s eye in the form of a photograph Vicky once shown to me. She was lively and radiant with a 12-year-old Vicky on her lap peering up adoringly. Then Vicky faded away into the brown background and Mrs. Dean grew older and more sickly looking and thousands of tube sprouted from her nose, mouth, and arm and a hospital bed grew beneath her. Its metal railings gave the ominous look of a cage around her shrinking form. She lay wrinkled, shriveled, and trembling like the last, lonely leave just barely hanging on to its tree. She peered from behind heavy lids toward someone out of sight. She mouthed an inaudible sentence and then smiled and then a man much younger than her appeared. He had tiny bits of gray in his hair and he carried himself like an older man, but he was clearly young. He removed his thin black overcoat and sat at the foot of her bed. The two then began to speak in a very familiar manner and then they gave each other a look. Their eyes locked in a warm and subtle manner. So subtle that I almost miss it, like the sun setting, but once I saw it, it almost blinded me, love. They both had love in their eyes, a very old and honest type that settled oddly in the bottom of my heart.



I laid myself down on the floor with my legs crossed and my hands serving as pillows. I stared up at a scuffmark that looked like an eye. I don’t know why I was fixated on that mark more than any other mark scattered across the ceilings and walls. But I studied every curve and nuance of it and committed it to memory and I lost myself in it, reading its curves and in its curves, I read myself. Its gentle curves told of how uneasy I felt about this whole situation, its jagged peak told of how alien I felt. It knew me well and threatened to expose me for who I was, Mark, a new spin on an old Judas and then I felt the tender brush of Vicky’s hand across my chest and the eerie but comforting feeling that you’re not laying alone. I turned my head to see that Vicky had woken and move to me while I was lost in my head.

“Did I wake you?” I whispered.

She looked at me with half opened eyes and said softly “No.” She then, laid her head on my shoulder and closer her eyes. I slowly ran my fingers through her silk hair and I closed my own.



Next morning, I awoke alone, which sent an antsy type of sickness through me, like you get when something doesn’t quite go right. But it was probably for the best that she returned to the bed. And within an hour or two, we were back on the road. Chris insisted I speed to make up time lost due to sleep, so we roared down the road, kicking up wind and dust. I could just see a trucker’s diner that claimed to have the world’s greatest pie. I made a mental note to stop there on the way back and put that claim to the test. I betrayed a slight chuckle when I thought to myself ‘I had the world’s best pie, but never the greatest.’ And then felt a small pang of guilt. I for some reason wanted to see the inside of that dust coated beauty. It was like a gut longing but still then, not quite a longing. It was hard to explain. It wasn’t exactly for pie, coffee or whatever they served as much as the place itself. That tiny diner stuck in my mind even after it was long out of sight, disappearing behind the horizon and leaving us no civilized quarter.





And there, in the long stretch of untamed nothingness; amidst my coveted cracked sand and stifling sunrays beating unmercifully on the car roof, it happened. The crash was in slow motion I think, or at least that’s how I remember it. The smooth ride leading up to a single solitary pop that echoed throughout the desert and sent the car hurdling into a ditch and out of the control of my useless hands. The wheel jerked violently out of my hands long before my brain got the message that something was wrong. The pop was quickly followed by curses and screams of confusion and terror as the sun-bathed desert shook wildly outside our windows. That then, was followed by dead silence, there probably was sound, breathing, the car settling, or even just ambient noise, but none of it registered in my ear. Chris broke the silence. He brought our worlds back on track with his concerned, brotherly “Is everyone alright?”

“Yeah, I’m fine”, Vicky, said as she rubbed Mya’s back comfortingly. Mya had begun to tremble and cry at some point in the midst of the silence. Vicky’s hair was blocking any clear view of her face, I assumed purposefully.



The car fell silent again, with exception to Mya tears and it was a terrible quiet, something like the ‘I don’t know what to say’ quiet you hear when someone dies and the mourners are looking for solace. I could tell that Chris was uneasy. The cogs were turning in his head, trying to fix a problem bigger than him. He needed his sisters to be okay for him to be all right. He needed her to say something, anything, and his eyes searched her tears for the right solution. But Mya had to work through a mound of shock, a mound of reality. She could have died, she could die, and from the look on her face I could tell, that never occurred to her before. But through the shock, she managed a quick nod and a sheepish “I’m Okay”.



Chris reached over, wiped a tear from her eye, and brushed her cheek with his fingers. “Let’s get some air,” Chris announced with a little more calm in his voice, He popped open his door and stepped out. Vicky followed suit and then Mya and lastly myself. We stood there in the middle of nowhere with the wind whipping our cheeks and wondering what we’d do next.



5. Chris, Kelly, and Molly’s Diner



My mind whirled with frustration and fatigue. I knew Mark had nothing to do with the crash but my head wanted to blame someone and it didn’t seem very fulfilling to blame a faulty tire. Especially with that look baby Mye gave. It would make everything so much easier if I could just blame him and kick the shit out of him. I just wanted to make it better, but with all that shit piling on my head, I knew I’d have to face the fact that I was powerless.



I turned to my sisters and Mark and announced that I’d hike back toward this rinky-dink diner a couple miles back. I only noticed it because of its overly boastful sign claiming the world’s best pie. I figured I could borrow their phone to call a tow truck and hopefully the guy driving could take us to a train station or something.



“I’ll come with.” Mark offered.

“No. Stay here in case some Hill-Billie or something comes along.” I didn’t think anyone would mess with them or the car but I didn’t want him near me at this particular moment. I started; calling back, “I’ll be back soon”. And giving a hand wave and marched on until they were out of sight.



I walked along the side of this endless stretch of fucking road and desert, praying for shade or for that damn diner to come into view, neither of which came. It was about 2 or 3 miles back (which isn’t that bad in a normal situation,) but in 110-degree heat and with no water it’s just plainly put ‘hell’. So I was baking literally, (So damn hot, you can’t sweat. You could feel your skin cooking like bacon,) and feeling dizzy and hoping what I was feeling wasn’t heat stroke, when a cherry red hot-rod came ripping down the road. It swerved haphazardly on and off the road, fishtailing with each turn. I entertained the idea of flagging him down but thought better of it. It appeared that this guy wouldn’t have even seen me and part of me doubted that he valued his own life, the way he was driving. So I let him disappear off into the simmer horizon and I went on.



I was thinking how sickening fresh air felt in my stomach and regretted not taking water with me when Molly’s diner peeked into view. It was a handsome sight, standing alone amongst the blazing sun and golden desert and it shined, it was like a hundred watt light bulb it was so bright, just daring to take on the sun.



My legs found new vigor as I pumped them, racing to Molly’s entrance. I reached the entrance peered in through the window. The lights were off and the diner was vacant. I fell into dread thinking I had to walk back and wait, I thought that my body protested. I checked a blue and white business hours sign: Monday through Saturday- 9:00am- 2:30am. Sunday: 12:00 pm-11:30pm. They should be open I thought to myself. I tested the door and it open with a cheery ring. I stepped in and looked around. The floor was sprayed with broken glass and napkins and there was a stink in the air. Something like meat baking in the desert heat, it stank; something had gone bad over night. I called out, “Hello”. There was no answer.

“Hello.” I called out again.

And then, a thought floated into my head, a robbery. The place looked tore apart, in the corner of my eye I could see a half-eaten plate of steak and potatoes being feasted upon by ants. I looked over to the register, it was opened and empty. Fear rose in my throat as another thought floated into my head. The stink in the air could be human.

“Hello” I called again, my voice cracking a little.



Another thought floated into my head, find a phone and call the police. I walked up to the counter and stupidly hesitated at a sign reading ‘employee’s only.’ I walked pass and looked around for a phone as my insides urged me to run away. This side of the corner looked as bad as the other, shattered plates and cup littered the floor. But no sign of a phone or even a phone cord. I moved farther back into the kitchen where the stink grew and rested comfortably in my nostrils. It looked like a typically diner’s kitchen, big metal table in the center, sinks, pots, pans, burners and what probably was a freezer in the back. It reminded me of a summer job I had, working in a kitchen at a sub shop. I, for a second wondered if the guy that works here was put off on this kind of food as much as I was after working there for a long while and then wondered if he was still alive.

“Hello.” I called for no reason. I wanted to vomit but settled on letting whatever came to mind fall out of my mouth. I muttered nonsensical sentences ending in “Fucking phone” and “Should go.” And there, with the stink fueling the furnace of my fears, I heard the strangely familiar, yet foreign sound of a gun cocking. I heard it, a hundred times in movies, but it sounded so much louder and crisper in true life.



I turned slowly and calmly toward a shivering, petite little red head with puffy eyes. I could tell her hair was at one time well managed but now clung messily to the side of her face, held by sweat and tears. She’d been crying and she looked tired, shivering and swaying and keeping her bloodshot green eyes trained on me. I looked her imploringly in the eyes, pleading her to know I meant no harm and despite the gun aimed at me, I got the sense that she wasn’t looking for conflict, she was shaking like she just had the worst night of her life.

“I’m not looking to hurt anyone.” I said slowly. She must have taken that as somewhat hostile because she tightened her grip on the gun and a cold wave of fear shot through me. I didn’t think she wanted to shoot me, but her intentions wouldn’t mean much if something stupid happened.

“Listen, I’m not here to hurt anyone. My car got a flat and I need a phone, that’s all.” I said, trying to send the message of honesty with my eyes and it seemed to work because she lowered the gun, a bit. And with tremble fingers and a throbbing mass in my throat, I raised my own hand and slowly brought it to the gun. I hesitated for what seemed like hours, battling with myself trying to mutter the nerve to take a loaded gun for its owner. But I finally placed my hand on the pistol and slowly moved it into a safer direction, where it discharged into a meat-cutting table.

“Wasn’t that loud.” I tried to joke to relieve the tension and I offered a nervous but friendly to emphasize my harmlessness. She gave a quick sound that might have been a giggle and release the gun into my hand. It was lighter than I thought a gun might be and it was warm. I remember something from a movie about wet guns being useless and wondered if it was true, but realized that I only needed her to think that.



I walked over to a sink where some pans were left to soak and I dropped it in and announced “No more gun.” Without her gun, she stood curtained by the shadows with her thin arms wrapped around her chest and a thought floated into my head and now I had someone to ask.

“What happened here?”






6. What kind of name is ‘Texas Pete?'



The world was still and over-flowed with a harsh, ugly type of beauty, something like empty clutter and the unfamiliar to weathered eyes. This stretch of road was dirty and under managed. Thousands of people must have took it and left only bits of garbage, hamburger wrappers, soda cups, water bottles, spent cigarettes, Twinkie wrappers etc. But there’s something to be said about seeing something you’ve never seen before. I took it all in and my eyes rested upon a stray garbage bag, snared by a desert shrub and played upon by the wind. I laughed a little as I thought about how ridiculous it was to find litter this far from anywhere and anything, but quickly concealed it when Vicky raised her head to look at me.



Her and I were leaning against the baking back end of the downed car while Mya sat cross-legged on the side of the road seemingly sun bathing. I had asked her how she could stand the hot pavement and she returned “How could you stand the hot metal,” and no one thought to bring up the idea of sitting in the car.

I let my head droop down and I stared at the cracks and scuffs in my sneakers and the fraying strands of my jean pant legs and my mind flushed empty, but for one thought. The sentence “Tell me I should be here,” fell out of my mouth and I could feel the sun beat the back of my neck. I made a silent prayer for sweat.

“I need you here.” Vicky said in a voice only addressed to me. I felt her thigh just barely brush my own and her thin finger touch the back of my forearm. And for a moment, I wondered how oblivious Mya was to this exchange and then realized how little I cared.



I followed the path Mya’s eyes were fixed on, down the road; on a point she could no longer see. “We’re going to be so late.” Mya said. The statement hung in the air waiting for an answer, a contradiction, something.

“Should Chris be this long?” Mya asked.

“The diner was a little ways off and he’d probably have to wait there for a tow to come. You know, to lead them here.”

“We should have gone with him,” Mya said to the road.

“Nah, He’s fine. Any second now you’ll see a tow truck coming.” I said feeling a small pang of unease nerve. This all had gone very wrong and me lying only seemed to amplify that fact and we all fell silent again.

‘What the hell am I doing here?’ I thought to myself.

“He’ll be back, soon.” I said for wanting to say something.

“Actually I think you’re right. I think I hear a car.” Mya said, her eyes straining to focus on the distant horizon. She awkwardly stood and brushed gravel from her legs and jean shorts before squinting at a distance glinting something rolling toward us.

As the sun’s shine receded from the windshield, the vehicle revealed itself not to be a tow truck, but an old pick-up with sanded off paint. It looked like the type of truck, only meant to be driven at night, through back alleys and mud slicked dirt roads. It was never meant to be so apparent. But there it was and it seemed to be poised toward us. The pick –up slowed as it come into full view and stopped right beside Mya, who had retreated into the sand and closer to Vicky and I.

“Y’all okay?” The driver asked. The voice seemed familiar, so I peered into the shaded cabin to see his face. That old, motel man from last night. I could see he kept on some of the shadows that hung around his face last night.

“Yeah … I meant we had an accident, but no one’s hurt and my brother should be back with the tow truck any second now.” Mya said, almost like she thought she might be lying.

“Well, we’re a long ways away from anything and you don’t wanna be out here for long, end up getting heat sick. Tell me where your brother went to and I’ll take you to him.”

“He went to that diner place, but he should be back soon, so we’re okay.” Mya said, looking back at us.

“Yeah, he’s been gone for awhile, but he’ll soon be back.” I said, feeling stupid repeating the same argument.



“All I’m saying is, you don’t want to be out here, if you’re out here, baking in the sun, you’ll need an ambulance to go with your tow truck. I’m just trying to do you a favor.” He said and then leaned over the passenger seat and popped the door open.



“Don’t worry, I’ll get you right where you got to go, scout’s honor.” The motel man said with two finger raised and a toothy grin. I found it hard to imagine this man as a Boy Scout, but when Mya looked back to Vicky and me for our answers, I gave a wearily head nod and Vicky push herself off the car and started toward the truck and I followed suit. As we all piled into the pick-up, (first me, sitting closest to the old man, then Vicky and then Mya,) Mya peered at the old man’s weathered cowboy hat and asked sheepishly “What does TP stand for?”

He grinned, revealing yellow teeth and black gums and said,” Texas Pete.”

“What kind of name is that?” Mya asked a little carelessly

“Don’t know, you’d have to ask the man the hat belonged to,”




7. The Incident at Molly’s Diner





The smell of burnt coffee and burgers wafted through the air as Molly’s voice screamed food orders over the static of the kitchen’s AM/FM radio. Molly muttered curses under her breath as she handed the dirty motel man his burger and fries and heard him mutter something about her breasts through the aura of cigarette smoke that so frequently surrounded him. She never liked him; she dealt with the worst of truckers, but couldn’t stand the way he stared at her. His eyes were like clawed hands gripping and tearing at her thin waist and her curvy hips. He had that lustful look that she’d get from men, but there was something more to it with him. He had the hints of something more predatory, like he was plotting something behind those black eyes of his and Molly tried her best to look unappealing to him, tried to look her age or maybe even older, tried to display her crows feet, her frown lines, her graying hairs. She was a tough woman, but would pride herself on maintaining her beauty and would at times use it as an asset, batting her eyes at venders to get them to lower their rates, keep truckers in line without ever raising her voice. But with that motel man, it seemed the same as a deer flaunting itself in front of a wolf. It seemed wiser to keep from his gaze, to look diseased and undesirable.



Kyle, in the kitchen was zipping around between the fries station, grill and industrial freezer. Bitterness and fatigue welled in him; he was three hours into his second shift, which he only agreed to as a favor to Molly and he was already regretting it. His back was soar and his mind was numb and he had burned himself twice so far. He was in the middle of flipping the burgers when a commotion arose in the seating area. There was an uproar of terror and screeching chairs, of crashing dishes and curse words and everything was finally muted by a single gun blast. The silence ringed in Kyle’s ears; it pounded like a drum and ached unbearably. Fear lodged itself in Kyle’s throat and started to choke him until his eyes welled with tears.



A single voice erupted through the pungent fear and silence and said “Okay, now that everyone’s calm, I’m going to need everyone belly down on the ground and to start emptying your pockets and I mean now, slow people will be shot in the head, just try me.” He said this with a conversational tone as if he were just suggesting an interesting activity. Kyle peered through the kitchen window to see the nine or so inhabitants of the diner descend to the feet of two brown haired men, both wielding shotguns, and a thin attractive redhead, holding a silver handgun.



It seemed that the younger of the two dark haired men had been the one who had spoken the order. He had a long face accented with an angular jaw line and a head full of messy brown curls, while his brother had more of a rounded, meaty face gently marked with wrinkles, implying that he was the older of the two, and peppered with brown stubble.



The elder brother started to collect the various wallets and purses offered to him by terrified diner patrons, while the younger brother led Kelly behind the counter. He then helped Molly back to her feet, looked her in the eyes and said “Now love, would you please be so kind as to open the register and hand the money inside to this tempting beauty here.” He gestured to Kelly and she blushed slightly. Molly popped the register open with a ding and started to empty it.



The younger brother turned to his brother and asked, “You got everyone, Luke?” Luke struggled not to drop anything as he juggled his gun, four wallets, three purses and a messy ball of cash. “Joe, I think someone’s holding out.” Luke said, almost dropping a cracked red leather purse embroidered with the initials “TS”.



Joe cocked his shotgun and said “Really? I’m pretty sure I said that slow people would be killed. So whose got over-laden pockets.”



He walked around the counter and into the crowd of shivering, fearful people, allowing the barrel of his gun to hover over people’s heads for moments at a time and make the statement “I own you,” and that statement was made well. It was all too clear that someone’s death would take less time and energy than to break a pencil. “Who’s going to die tonight?” Joe asked allowing the barrel to linger above the motel man’s head. He looked down upon the man, who had taken his scotch with him to the ground. “Did you get this gentleman, Luke?” Joe asked looking up to his brother. Luke craned his head for a better look of the man. “No, now that you mention it, I must have missed him.” Joe snatched the man by the collar and forced him to his feet.



“Sir, would you empty your pockets for me?” Joe said shoving the dirty motel man up against the large well-cleaned window of the diner.



The Motel man gave a deep, hoarse chuckle that seemed to knock some phlegm lose from his throat, “Boy Toy, You’ve got some bark, but I’m gonna need some bite before I can hand my wallet over.” Joe betrayed his guise of intimidation for a moment, showing rather a look of shock and surprise. He then collected himself and said loud and venomously “You think this is a game, that I won’t shoot you dead for a wallet! You don’t mean a thing to me!”



“Bark, Bark, little pup.” He said pulling a can of chewing tobacco out of his shirt pocket. He popped the cover off with his thumb and rest that arm on Joe’s shoulder. He then rested his other arm on the other shoulder to remove a bit of it. It was eerie how he lingered there, how they lingered there, staring at each other before the motel Man spoke up “If you’re wondering what I’m doing , I’m giving you no other choice. You better use that boom-stick.”



Joe’s fingers rippled on the handle of his gun as fear surged in him. He never wanted it to take this long. It was supposed to be quick and easy. They’d come in and fire the gun a couple times, grab the cash and go. Joe gritted his teeth, tightened his grip on his shotgun and said, “Let’s go.” He then back away from the Old man and turned to his two associates. “Come on, we’re going” He said heading toward the door.



“Joey boy, come on, stay. The fun’s just about to start.” The Motel Man said with a devil-fabricated grin stretched over his face.



Joe stopped in his track and stood very still for a moment before turning again to the motel man and swinging the shotgun like a baseball bat into his stomach. “You don’t get to use my name, you old fagot.” Joe roared.



“Finally, we see some life from my boy Joe.” The Motel Man said hunched over holding his gut.

“Shut up!” Joe roared as he brought down another blow across the old man’s back.

“Joey, that ain’t the way you’re supposed to use that thing.” The Old Man said in a grumbling gasp.

“Shut the Fuck Up,” Joe screeched. Joe shoved the barrel of the gun harshly into the side of the old man’s head. “Keep your mouth shut.” Joe said, with a heated shutter in his voice.

At this moment, the entire diner was saturated in a horrible silence that seeped down everyone’s throat and into their lungs. That silence washed over everything, plates and floors, the counter tops and windows and broken by the cheery ring of a bell as a pale, fair faced young man with long, blonde hair entered the diner, walked past Luke and took a seat at the counter. He brushed his hair from his face and raised a finger in the air and said, “Cup of Coffee, Please.”



Joe turned and looked at the fair-faced man irritably, trying to ooze with venom or will him to death. Joe was tired; he could feel it in his back, bones and mind. He could hardly bear it and it was made even worst by the growing number of on lookers. A growing number of people were looking up at him, at his face, memorizing it and when the pressure became too incredible to bear, Joe felt it burn away like wildfire through dry- underbrush, starting from his side, ripping through his kidney, up his spinal cord, wrapping around his ribs, through his muscles, up his chest, into his throat, into his brain and burning out his optic nerve as he saw the fair faced man snatch up the helpless Kelly from behind the counter and hold a knife to her throat.



Joe’s knees buckled under him and he went sailing into the counter top and then onto the floor. The Motel Man crouched down to retrieve his knife from Joe’s side and rose again with it and Joe’s Shotgun. Luke gave a deep-throated roar and tried for his gun, but managed only to drop it along with two purses and a couple of twenties. The old man gave an irritated look and lazily pointed the shotgun at Luke and pulled the trigger. Luke went lumbering into a booth.



The diner was silent again, apart from Kelly and the Fair faced man wrestling, her giving sheepish cries for help and useless commands to be released as the diners watched the two. Texas stepped over Joe’s dying body and toward Kelly. He snatched her gun out of her hand and pocketed it. He then turned. Cocked his gun and said with one hell of an excited smile “We’re gonna have fun tonight.”

Is She Dead?

He sat, in someone else's body. A poor albono girl who was too afraid to realize she'd been Killed.
And there that girl sat, skinny blonde thing with a little stick of a boomstick for comfort. She had the mind to kill me if she could.
He was twisting a divet into the ground with point of a dull blade. My eyes clung to the blade as I opened my mouth.
"Is she dead?"
I don't stick around long enough to know.
"Would you have a best guess." He looked at me with bemused eyes. The question was ...what? Quaint? Childish? Ignorant? I could tell he was looking down at me, but I wasn't sure which way.
"I'll say she ain't doing good. I'll say it'd be better if you thought of this girl as dead." I ran a hand along the soft curve of her breast. Part, because I wanted to get under the other girl's skin in the old fashion sense. Part, because I'm a man with access to young titty.
"Then there's nothing to stop me from killing you." I said while leveling the shotgun at him. He didn't flee out of the sights.
I'm about done with this bitch anyhow. But... that would make sure that this girl is dead.
I kept the shotgun leveed. I pulled the trigger.

The Last Rike: The Red Convoy

The girl was mum. Except for soft tears and the shrill screams, she remained mum about the path that the Red Convoy had traveled and the fact that she wouldn’t speak, meant the covered wagons were moving ever further from him. He had suspicions that the herb shop owner might have been a loyal customer, despite his denials. He figured he’d just ditch the girl and attempt it again with another child. She didn’t trust him, he didn’t have time for her.
The Wanderer and the girl took camp at the base of a crumbling rock face a mile outside of the town. It jetted high into the blazing sky and cast a mile long shadow that spin with the sun like a giant sundial. At night, the girl sat silent, transfixed by the crackling firelight as the Wanderer fussed with his shooters. Though he had disassembled them, painstakingly cleaned the parts with gun oil and reassembled the guns, they only shot sporadically. He tested the guns while he went out for game. He’d draw one of the guns on a smoky gray rabbit, or a scaly sidewinder and say a little prayer that this time the gun would work dependably. When the gun fired, he had hope and when it didn’t, he said, “Fucking Pig shit.”
The night he had the mind to ditch the girl for whomever the herb shop owner might have been hiding, the guns hadn’t fired and he had to work that much hard to slaughter the fat hare that roasted on his makeshift spit. He stared at her as she stared at the dancing firelight. He was working on the guns again, working the cold metal with a oily rag.
“Did my daddy send you?” The girl asked and the Wanderer almost didn’t recognize what she asked as speech.
“Hmm?” The Wanderer asked, now working a brush through the gun’s chambers.
“My daddy. Is he paying you to bring me back home?”
“I don’t know your daddy.”
“Oh…” The only sound for a small while was that of fat sizzling in the fire.
“Are you going to kill me, then?”
“I wouldn’t waste time feeding you , if I aimed to kill you.”
“Oh…” She said softly. Her eyes turned back to the fire. The hare was near finished and the Wanderer cleaned his hands to carve the rabbit for eating. He pulled the smoking rabbit from the fire and began cutting into its meaty haunches.
“My daddy is a bad man. My mama made bad baby, but for me. He wanted me to make him one.” The Wanderer didn’t reply to this.
“I ran away before he could and they picked me up. I thought they were being nice, but…” She went silent for a while and the Wanderer was the same. The Wanderer finally offered her some meat on a greasy stained cloth. She picked at it shyly. The meat was dry and stringy and made them both wish for cold water to wash the taste away, though neither complained aloud.
“They kept me chained in a dark room.” She said, displaying a series of scars around his ankle. “They took my virginity and I thought I was going to die. They cut me.” She said, displaying ragged scars etched along her calves and lower thighs. She also bared her arms to him, showing the scars there. The Wanderer didn’t want to play ’Show Me Your Scars.’ His scars were apparent anyways. His shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbows and just there was a road map of the hell he had seen.
“You growl in your sleep and your eyes get misty like you want to cry.” She told him. “Do I do that when I sleep?”
“No.” The Wanderer said, carving more of the rabbit.
“I thought I might have. I feel like I do.”
“What about that Convoy you came off of? You most have gleamed something while you were with them.” The Wanderer said.
“I don’t want to go there.”
“That’s where I need to be.”
“I can’t go there.”
“You don’t need to, I just need that location.”
“Would you leave me alone?”
“I’m finding that Convoy one way or the other. You don’t got to go.”
“They might pick me up like they did before. They might hurt me again.”
“That seems to be the situation.” There was another long pause where only the crackle of flames and the two of them working through the rabbit meat could be hear.
“They picked me up along ways away from here and they’re been traveling steady in the same directions. Once going that way…” She said pointing into the north.. “ And then the other.” She said, pointing into the south. “The think they’ll stay on that path, but I can’t be sure of that.”
“You know which they were last?”
“Going into the south.” She said. She stared down into the pale blue, muted sands of the south. The moon was high and clear, shedding light for miles and miles. The Wanderer had the thought that she might be lying. Sending him in the wrong direction would benefit her completely. She wouldn’t be alone and wouldn’t have to walk the path of her captors. The thought came and leave without much exploration. She was afraid of them, but she was afraid of him as well. The image of her dead body half buried in the sands was too easy to envision for the both of them.
“I don’t want to go there, though.” She added to her long past line of thought. By the time she had added this comment, the Wanderer was done with the rabbit and rolling a cigarette for himself.
“You said your name was Clod, right?” She asked, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees.
“Mmm” He grunted with the cigarette pursed between his lips. He struck a sulfur match on his thigh and lit the tightly rolled cigarette.
“My name is Macy.” The Wanderer blew smoke out his nostrils. Macy didn’t speak anymore that night.

Porno Dream: An Essay

As I write this, I am a reasonably healthy 22 year old male with an equal 22 year old sexual appetite. How then, with my healthy 22 year old sexual appetite, might I have a porno dream, but only about a dissatisfied writer who fell into the (according to my dream, ill-informed as it is) lucrative and friendly world of writing for pornography? How then, would the dream be about a 30 something New York Jew with an eight year old kid?
The dream started with a notably bland establishing conflict: the young boy, tear-stricken on the stair, mourning his lost opportunity. His class would soon be off to Washington and without him. And why? Because his father was a writer and not the Stephen King kind, not the Dan Brown kind, the boy’s father wanted to be, but the boy’s father was having less and less luck in selling anything at all.
Guilty and frustrated, the father calls up a college friend who he always remembered to be very ambitious and figured would have been quite successful. He finds that the man remembers him and remembers him to be a fair writer. He offers him a job writing for low-budget features. The scenario wasn’t so ridiculous or sexy as the father coming in for his first day of work to see a woman straddling a man atop his desk. The college friend, an eccentric black man, says the industry outright and the father thinks about the job for awhile. He takes the job and writes a slue of entertaining fantasy scripts, but wouldn’t follow the scripts into production.
An overwritten bit I thought, the father was followed from paycheck to paycheck. With each, the father says, “This isn’t what I expected,” in varying Woody Allen contexts, ending in the black man strapped into a Baby Byron on the writer’s back. They’re at a fun run they agreed to do together.
The rest could be expected, the increase of wealth, but at the cost of terrible existential angst. He’s whoring his art, but he’s whoring his art for his son. The son goes to Washington with extra cash in his pockets. He continues the job, as whores might, because the money solved problems the writer had gotten used to have. Bills paid on time and in the full amount, how incredible. Dinner, not horribly burnt by the writer’s hand, but made well by others.
The college friend insists that the writer view one of the finished productions. “Ladies of the Plates.” He caved and watched the movie and it wasn’t nearly the most interesting part, sex scenes as they are. It was only girls, college girls, fully dressed and running around like children, flittering paper plates at each others and laughing gleefully. It kept my attention in the lower sense, if you caught my drift, but it isn’t high art or very intelligible.
The writer didn’t feel as bad about his found occasion, seeing the ridiculousness of it. He doesn’t like the bastardization of his begrudged work.

The Last Rike: Book One - The Wanderer and The Girl

The Last Rike: Book One - The Wanderer and The Girl
By Matthew Jones
Swirling sands shifted underneath the heel of the Wanderer as he made his way down the one road leading into town. Eyes loomed down on him from the shadows, coveting his unblemished flesh, taut with the apparent vestiges of youth. The looming eyes yearned and wished, but minded their manners. The Wanderer’s sword, displayed plain on his back, and the wanderer’s guns, strapped securely on his hips saw to that. They’d hate their twisted selves in the darkness and think their twisted thoughts, and the wanderer would care, long as they stayed where they were.
The Wanderer turned off the road, moving into the porch of a shadowy tavern offering little solace better than it protected one from the oppressive sun overhead. A slumbering old man with four horns peering out from his forehead kept guard in a creaking rocking chair. Between his outstretch rested a bowling ball. Its chain stretched upward to the old man’s limp wrist. The Wanderer had seen these weapons bowl a man’s chest in and made careful not to disturb him. Beyond the bat-wing doors, was a dim, lonesome place smelling of soured beer and human stink. A pile of broken furniture was placed in a corner and the Wanderer mused about it’d make good kindling and he’d do the occupants a favor by burning the bar to the ground. He took a seat at the bar and noted a drunken flesh pile slowly swaying to his far left. His body rolled inside a filth stained pair of overalls.
The bar maid made odd clatters in a backroom behind the bar and when she emerged, her hands dotted with bits of red. She eyed the Wanderer and hastily wiped the red away on the seat of her loose hanging black dress. The woman had a dog face under a curly mound of graying hair. She was thin with painful seeming hunchback.
“Water,” The Wanderer said in a hollow voice, his head hung low. The bar maid just stared, her fingers unconsciously rising to sword fighter’s face. He shifted his fiery blue eyes to the woman and she repented the hand, placing it between her sagging breasts. The Wanderer could make out a P E R K I on her left breast pocket. At the time, this information didn’t seem important, but he filed it away. The Wanderer knew it was more the big blade glaring off his back like some terrible vulture that stayed her hand, but it all amounted to the same thing. The world was wrong, no better way to put it. Sometime in the long way back when, Man’s started to rot off the bone, minds started to sour in their owner’s skulls, and any signs of health might a life on the run, a life by the gun, by the blade.
“Water,” The Wanderer repeated with more authority woven in his words. She turned away from him to a manual water pump set low at the far side of the bar. She put her hand on the lever to pump and paused.
“How you want it?” She asked in a quivering voice that was more old age then nerve.
“Out a picture, if it’d do you.” The Wanderer said, keeping his eye on the bar top.
“You got coppers for that?” She asked, taking her hand for the pump lever. The Wanderer clicked a gold coin on the bar top and with that she fetched a pitcher from beneath the counter top. The water splashed a brownish hue into the picture, but the Wanderer took it happily. The bar maid dropped her hand over the coin and slid it over to her.
“That a shined up copper? Shined up Bronze, maybe?” She said with a conspiratory flick of her eye to the swaying flesh mound. She wanted to play friendly. She wanted to play motherly. She was saying, ‘Keep your coins close, lest someone snatch them, dear boy,’ with that motion of the eyes. She wanted to believe that he was an innocent, despite the guns, the sword and the hard stare. The Wanderer was fine with letting her think as long as she kept her manners. The Wanderer gripped the pitcher and the bar maid turned toward the backroom.
“Ay, Water ain’t worth gold. Not when you’re sitting on a well. I got something coming back to me.” She paused and issued a nervous laugh.
“Must have slipped my mind. “ She said fishing metals from a drawstring purse of her hip. She dropped a couple coppers on the countertop and hurried to dote on her other customer. The Wanderer took his pitcher out on the porch and took a seat in a counter furthest from the slumbering old man. He sucked down as much of the water as his stomach could hold and poured the rest down on his head, praising its cold. He sat steady in the shade for a moment, staring at the sand roll along the path of the road.
He picked himself up and stepped off the porch, leaving the pitcher behind. In the corner of his eye, he saw the bar maid exit through the batwings and scoop up the picture.
“Come back,” She cried. The Wanderer didn’t turn and the bar maid added a slight diminished, “If you have a mind to.” The last the Wanderer saw of the Bar maid was her kissing the pitcher he’d left. He’d seen that as well, as if health were a disease one could catch.
The wanderer moved his hand to the cold butt of his right gun. They’d been cold for as long as the wanderer had the ancient death machines, and he had no mind for why. His eyes locked on the rivalry of the marketplace. Men, women and children scampered about with packages tucked safely from sudden theft. There was never a place of more lawlessness than that of the marketplaces of this world. The Wanderer moved silently into the crowd of people, his head low, his belongings secured and fastened. There wasn’t mercy in the crowd, but there was anonymity abound for those who wished it. Everyone was afraid of being gut-shot for their goods to ogle a fair faced man making his way by.
The wanderer spilled into a small shop smelling of herbs. Inside sat gun-shot barrels filled with tobacco, feed, thyme, rosemary and on and on. Overseeing the barrels were three gun toting men, two of whom held machine gun that were almost cartoonish in size. A single bullet for one of those guns might have torn the little shop in half. The one without a ridiculously large machine gun narrowed his eyes on the Wanderer and brandished his own hand-canon quickly, so as to make sure everyone was on the same page.
‘I see your guns, you see ours. Let’s not waste bullets over a bag of tobacco.’ That motion said.
The wanderer moved to the barrel containing the tobacco and took out an empty bag of his pack. That motion sent the tingling burn of watchful eye dancing across his neck. The tingle stopped when it was apparent that the wanderer wasn’t reaching for a concealed weapon. The wanderer filled his bag and secured the bundle with a strand of rawhide. Once it was secure, he felt the tingling again and it was shortly followed by a strong, but flabby arm wrapping around his chest. A kiss peppered with gruff whiskers and stinking of strong liquors descended on his neck. The single arm secured him well, and with the other, his bundle was wrenched from his hand. The tobacco pouch hit the ground and the Wanderer was propelled backward, a hot stiffness pressed into the small of his back.
Had his abductor been hasty and took the Wanderer with the unpaid goods in hand, the abductor would have had a bullet between the eyes, and a few more everywhere else. The Wanderer squirmed his arm downward toward the butt of his left gun and touched the cold iron whilst in the midst of the bustling crowd. The Wanderer wrapped his fingers around the handle, pulled and shot in the only direction his arm could move. The Wanderer aimed for where the flabby abductor’s foot should have been and relished the cry of pain that followed the blast. The abductor loosened his grip and the Wanderer burst out of it. He returned the gun to its belt as the marketplace emptied. Screams had echoed louder than the blast and were dying and the Wander waited. He drew his sword; he wouldn’t more bullets on the drunken flesh pile from the bar. The chaos had died enough that his voice could be heard and the flesh pile had collected himself enough to see the Wanderer hadn’t run. The flesh pile stepped forward, he wasn’t backing down either. He had fresh flesh. Taut flesh. Young flesh. He had flesh that would sting his prick if he got to stick it in, it didn’t matter to him, if that the hole he was looking to invade was on a man.
The Wander put the sword between the two of them and recited the line had offered to countless fools looking to fulfill some ambition.
“This is the sharpest thing in all the world! She’s killed better man than you! Cry off!” The flesh pile wasn’t looking to reason, he was hurt and horny. He charged forth and the Wanderer made a swift motion across the men’s chest, moving from the top of the right shoulder, going cleanly through the man’s body and exiting just above the man’s left hip. The flesh pile fell into two pieces, both splattering the sandy marketplace with black blood. The crept forward and the Wanderer stepped back onto the Herb Shop’s porch to avoid it touching his boots. This wasn’t for vanity, but common sense, the blood of the wrong folk burned to the touch. The flesh pile would spend a long while in the sun, drying out, before someone would try and move him.
The Wanderer wiped his blade off with a cloth and threw it to the dead flesh pile, a consolation prize. He then slid his long sword back into its sheath and returned to the shop. On the floor, as it had been, was his tobacco pouch. He scooped it up and dropped a single gold coin on the countertop before the gun toting storekeepers. One of the men had his ridiculous machine drawn and aimed at him; he was expecting vengeance, but the Wanderer held no bile for their inaction. He’d played this scene out a number of times. He expected them to, just like he expected the sun to rise. He walked toward the door way when one of the men called after him.
“Wasn’t anything personal.” The man with the hand canon said.
“I know it.” The Wanderer replied, not breaking his gate. He did stop just outside the door, however. He looked over his shoulder and asked a question he’d asked in every town he’d been in.
“Flower-men come through, at all?”
“Us don’t mess with the Flower-men. Probably the man you killed might have, but we Christians. Ever if the good book said it were fine to take bed with babies, it’s still wrong.” The hand canon man said. The rifle man who had aimed at the Wanderer was still aiming.
“Have they come through?” The Wanderer repeated.
“About a week back, I reckon.”
“Who does mess with the Flower-men?”
“No one round here. We’re good folk, ‘cept for some exceptions” The Wanderer drew his sword and suddenly he had two ridiculously big machine guns aimed at him.
“Who are the exceptions?” The Wanderer said, heedless of the guns.
“The Perkins Boys over on High Hill road. I don’t know for sure, but if anyone would, it’d be them. Nasty Bastards, them.” The Wanderer stepped back out of the shop and down along the road.
2. The Death Of Super Soldiers
The Wanderer’s life had been saved by the competitive nature of the Child Prostitution Industry. That is, his ability to take in air was saved by their relentless chase for money. The Wanderer was found, along with three others, in hibernation pods, deep under that the Mountains of what once was The Lost River Ranges. Scavengers had broken a thousand year seal and looted what once was cutting edge testing equipment for scrap metal. The biggest find, however, were the four live babies, four live, blonde babies. Blondes were worth so much more than regulars. Those babies were found a midst of dead ones. At least two thousand by final count.
What those scavengers stumbled upon was, the last great Nazi Eugenics Project. The Annexed Nazi scientists from after WWII had grouped together and shared notes. They revived their beloved super soldier research. When the world turned, the successors of the original scientists sealed the laboratories and instructed the computers to only reopen when the seal when men of proper genetic heritage and of proper mental faculties came calling. Those scientists hadn’t anticipated how much corrosion a thousand years would breed and how many explosives an average mutant scavenger carried at any given moment.
The computers tried their best to keep all two thousand specimens alive, feeding them their own protein injected waste and filtering in liquid air for them to breath. But the specimens began to fail four centuries after the doors were sealed. As children died, never breathing real air, or using the eyes, the computer redirected power to preserving the surviving children. This continued until there was but the sole four who were stole away to the Flower-Men.
3. The Flower Men
The flower men hadn’t any interest in whoring out babies just taken from the womb. Their business was in preparing those babes for their careers. A child who knew a life other than that of their master’s home were more likely to try and return to it. They made lifetime companions, too stupid and afraid to want better. The flower men kept their flowers healthy enough until they were old enough to undergo the roughness of their future masters. But the Flower men weren’t ones to coddle their babes.
‘In all thing, a firm hand’ was their mantra and the evidence of that was found in the broken jaws and bruised flesh of their flowers. The young Wanderer wasn’t immune to these injuries and suffered worst because of his inability to let an injury go without retaliation. At the young age of five, the young wanderer could knowledgeably describe the violent inelegance of electrocution and the blinding pain of a snapped femur. The flower men broken him down, mended him and started the process over again. That cycle only ended with a chance discovery by the young wanderer.
He had found a girl in a shit-house’s shit-pit. She was blonde like him. In fact, she was one of his pod-mates stolen from the laboratory. She lay dead down there, her skull dented in. One of the Flower-men probably got overzealous, or maybe couldn’t wait for his flower to blossom. It didn’t matter to the young wanderer, it meant all the same. She was dead and was discarded like something worthless. The same might happen to him. He had no reason to expect better. He had decided he should die and he thought he knew how he should die.
He climbed down into the toilet and he waited. It took a long time and he spent it cradling the girl in his arms. The time came with the dying of the light, with the calling of his name and with a fat ass sitting on the seat above. The man’s bullocks hung low and the young wanderer could easily grip and wrench on them. The man screamed and clawed at the young wanderer and, to the young wanderer’s satisfaction, the man bled. It had to hurt, it had to bleed, the man needed to lose control or if the young wanderer was luck, he had to die and someone else would have to lose control. The man managed to wrestle to wanderer’s fingers off and ,to the young wanderer’s misfortune, he didn’t lose control. The man thought he might have, he beat the boy until his hands were sore and shaking. He beat the boy to a bloodied pulp and he left the boy, bloodied and covered in shit, by the outhouses.
Another of the flower-men had happened upon the young wanderer and thought him dead. He thought so until he looked into the child’s eyes. They were opened and twitching with the rage his broken bones couldn't express.
It was decided that the young wanderer was ruined for the bedroom, but also that he would make them money yet.
4. Knuckle Dragger
The Wanderer walked up the weed ridden path marked by the locals as High hill road. It was lined by bleached-white, skeletal desert trees which clawed down toward him in the oppressive light. He noted an old, two-story homestead, very much near collapse. The stead hadn’t known a refresh of whitewash in what might have been year, making the wood look soured and rotten. Busted rockers waited on the porch for someone to fix them or turn them into kindling. The ladder seemed more likely. He sniffed at the air and smelt pig shit. The region wasn’t right for pigs, or livestock of any merit, but the Wanderer smelt it all the same.
The Wanderer stepped up on to the porch, dropping his hand to the butt of his right gun and with his left hand, he pounded on the door. He had no idea if people had fear of lawmen in that town, but an authoritative hand wasn’t much of a gamble. An indistinct holler rang up from the far back, a deep voice, a man’s voice. The Wanderer waited on the porch, though he heard footsteps approaching from around the south-facing corner of the house. A thin man came around the side. He had a sunken chin, bloodshot eyes and bloodstained hands up to the forearm. He made no effort to clean his hands and possibly, he was hoping the blood would scare off the intruder who dared to disturb his afternoon.
“What you want?” He said simply.
“Heard talk, you and ours had dealing with the Flower-men.”
“What of it, if we did?”
“I don’t got quarrel with you, none worth killing for, but I’m taking your purchase, you hear.”
“Doubt that’s going to happen, pretty.”
“You want bloodshed, then that’s on you, but I’m taking what I came for.”
“Nice, little sticker you got there on your back. Here’s mine.” He reached round to his backside, but the Wanderer put a bullet in his belly behind he could show off his weapon. The man fell to his knees, clutching his belly. The new blood made little difference as it mixed in with the old.
New hollers kicked up inside the homestead. The Wanderer counted three additional voices separate from the original voice he heard. He stepped off the porch and lifted the diminished chin of the gut-shot man.
“I’ll kill each and everyone one of them. Five coffins for some little bitch. What sense is that? Where is your purchase?”
“They kill you. They will.” The gut-shot man said through chokes and coughs.
“No. I’ll kill them all, just like I killed you.” The Wanderer corrected, drawing his sword and pressing it softly on the gut-shot man’s throat.
“You do that, pretty. You’ll be joining me anyhow.” The Wanderer obliged, severing the man’s head from his neck. While the man bled his dark blood across the sand, the Wanderer stole a glance at what he was reaching for, a hooked knife with a considerable length to it.
He stepped back on the porch as the blood spread. With the gut-shot man not coughing and dying, the Wanderer could hear motion on the inside. The fact that they didn’t run out right away meant they were going out the back or they getting guns. The ladder turned out to be true, as a bullet broke a pane of glass and whistled passed his ear. He planted his boot on the wood of the front door and forced it down. The shock of the intruder forced the shooter to forget himself for a moment, but not for long. The shooter got off two shots from a long-barreled revolver, before the Wanderer sprung behind a moth-eaten couch. Two more shot through the couch, but were more random.
‘One more bullet on that gun. Trigger happy idiot.’ The Wanderer thought. Half-clumsy, hurried footsteps approach the pair, but to the benefit of the Trigger happy idiot. Whispers were exchanged, but the Wanderer didn’t need to hear any of it to know what they saying.
‘You idiot, he could have taken your head off. He’s behind that couch.’
A sudden, metal thud told the Wanderer that the newcomer had something bigger than the Trigger happy idiot’s revolver.
He released his own death machine, but didn’t send his blade to bed. He tested the weight of his cover. There wasn’t much in there, but it’d throw them for a second. He gripped the couch from the bottom, gave a violent jerk upward. As the couch flipped up and forward his swiped his sword through it, turning the blade, so as to disturb as much of the insides as possible. The two halves crashed to the ground in a cloud of shrapnel. The Wanderer charged between the two halves, as bullets whizzed passed him. The newcomer did, indeed, have something bigger than a revolver. He wielded a shotgun twice his, four foot, size. The midget was having trouble getting shots off with the big rifle and therefore, the Wanderer took to his side. The trigger happy idiot wasn’t much of one, he’d been refilling his gun in the silence before the shooting. The Wanderer got to the midget and halved the shotgun before he could get off his third shot and the trigger happy idiot killed him, trying to shoot the Wanderer. The midget fell, his skull painting the wall behind him. The Wanderer turned, slashed the trigger happy idiot’s gun hand off and shoved his death machine between the man’s teeth all in one fluid motion. The barrel punched the back of his throat and the man fell backward onto his ass.
“You get to live if you take me to the boy.” The Wanderer offered.
“Fuck you.” The trigger happy idiot said in a shivering, broken voice. The gun had done some damage to his teeth and his mouth was filling up with blood. The idiot spat at the Wanderer and the Wanderer halved the idiot’s skull, long ways.
The Wanderer holstered his gun and moved on through the house, the sounds of silence bothering him more than the gunfire had, prior. He knew there were two more men and for some reason, they were being quiet as the grave. There was a sudden knock, a purposeful one. Someone was trying to pull his strings, lead him away. The knocking was coming from a west facing hallway and the Wanderer let his blade lead him down the hall. A second knock sounded, high up on the wall. He wanted to let the Wanderer know how tall he was or that he had access to a ladder. The third told the Wanderer how big a fist the man had. The man probably wasn’t on a ladder by the Wanderer reckoning. The four shock dust off the walls, along with bits of splintered debris. By the Wanderer’s reckoning, he was a big man, cocky to boot. He probably had a good weapon on him, probably was expecting his intruder to rush around the corner, rush through the doorway. The Wanderer also noticed that the man was moving around. The Wanderer couldn’t hear the footsteps, but he noted that the banging sounded from different walls. He wanted the Wanderer to come, but to come blindly.
The Wanderer stopped before a closed, wooden door as the fifth bang sounded. It shook the door in its frame and the Wanderer knew he was in the right place. He pressed his foot against the wood of the door and broke it open. As the door swung inward, he launched himself out of the way of any potential gunfire. None sounded. He moved forward, stopping just before the entrance way. He watched the reflection off the length of his blade, angling it to see in the room.
“Dragger.” The Wanderer whispered.
“Is that my sword?” Knuckle Dragger asked along.
Knuckle Dragger was, indeed, a massive man with arms as big as refrigerators and long enough to plant his hands flat on the ground. He held a big metal stick that might have been ripped from the ground somewhere. The Wanderer walked forth into the room, his sword drawn and his eyes planted upward to its prior owner.
5. The Bad Games
The Flower-men had healed the young Wanderer, as they had before, and then they burned him with their mark. This as customary for anyone submitted to gladiatorial combat. The killers, young and old, deserved trophies for their effort. A hunk of flesh would do instead of their freedom. As customary, the young Wanderer fought with other boys and commonly, the Wanderer killed them. He realized the strength he had in his hands and he realized he was buying more and more with every kill. He would learn years later, when rage died some, that he was spending peace of mind. If you were to search his pack, you’d find a tooth-marked leather strap. He used it to prevent him from injuring himself in his sleep or screaming his location to some vulture with a knife.
To keep the fights interesting and profitable, they put the Wanderer up against lesser and lesser even odds. The young Wanderer drew two types of spectator, one who cooed at his beauty, how much a shame it was that such a beautiful blonde was ruined for the bedroom and one who yearned to see such a beautiful blonde bleed. To satisfy both groups, the Wanderer was given little to fight in and nothing to fight with. Even with these odds, the young Wanderer failed to die and this fact, more than his blonde hair, made him valuable. Ownership of the young Wanderer changed hands a number of times and a number of times, the young Wanderer suffered new marks being burned into his skin. He had seven marks on his back by the time he found himself the property of the Bad Games. His previous owner had been killed in the crowd after one of the man who owed his master chose not to pay. The young Wanderer was in the fighter’s pen without someone to collect him, so the games kept him.
In those days, the games were run by Knuckle Dragger and his men, and for a long time, Knuckle Dragger entertained the thought that he’d have better luck killing the young Wanderer. He started the boy against monster man standing two stories high. The young Wanderer, as per usual, killed his opponents, and, to Knuckle Dragger’s surprise, the boy swiftly gained Dragger’s respect. The opponents only got harder. The crowd expected more vicious combat, but the young Wanderer was offered his first weapon, a staff with a sharpened end. The young Wanderer did good killing with that staff and tried it with an affection typically reserved for living beings.
The first time the young Wanderer saw the sharpest thing in the world slung on Knuckle Dragger’s hip, the Wanderer felt a mixture of lust and guilt. He couldn’t articulate either emotion, his outlets of expression being his fists, but he knew want and he knew wanting that blade meant betraying the one dependable thing he had ever known. So, he ignored the blade, averted his eyes at its presence, but still it called to him. In the dark hours, when nothing wanted his life, he thought he heard it call him. It didn’t use words, just images and inclinations. The Wanderer wouldn’t be able to say whether he or the blade planned their uniting, but every night, it told him more and more. It wanted him to show his intelligence to Knuckle Dragger, it wanted him to show promise, because Knuckle Dragger had a habit of noticing promise and beginning it in closer to him.
The young Wanderer wasn’t sure what qualified as promise, but he knew man like Knuckle Dragger wanted something more than the life and death, savage scramble he’d been giving. They wanted art, they wanted showmanship, they didn’t want the kill, they wanted the hurt. The young Wanderer would deliver.
The man standing before the young Wanderer, in the blood-spattered ring, was different somehow. He was smaller than the others the child had killed. He was man-sized and man-shaped. He could fit into the sand colored cloth armor of the old days and boar a sword similar to the sharpest thing in the world. Still, as the young Wanderer stripped the armored man of his sword, he thought of it as somehow stupid, dull, incomplete. The Wanderer found himself standing on the armored man’s chest with the sword poised to bite. He stayed his hand and tossed the sword away from the both of them, as did he, his staff.
Bugged eyed, the man stood before the boy and that man felt fear. The young Wanderer read the tell-tale signs and the tell-tale bluffs. The widening of the irises, the twitching of the nostrils, the slow tensing and relaxing of the neck and shoulder muscles, it was all there.
The man burst forward and the young Wanderer charged the same. The young Wanderer knew nothing of the inner workings of the human throat, but he knew how, completely, stole one’s breath. He struck and skirted away from the man’s still accelerating mass. He crashed to the ground, choking on his own swelling throat. The Wanderer waited as the man climbed a mountain to get to his knees.
The young Wanderer knew nothing of the sensitivity of the Vagus Nerve. The particular branch of medical terminology was foreign. As, one would expect, were any branch of medicine. He knew nothing of the Vagus Nerves, but he knew how it dropped a man and left him seizing in the dirt. He drove his knee into the man’s back, just around the liver and the man dropped. The boy’s instinct said, ‘Kill. End this.’ But he fought that thought and instead, dropped his knee right into that sensitive nerve ending. The man vomited into the dirt and tears escaped his eyes. Part of the boy thought it was a problem that Knuckle Dragger would hear the man scream. The man’s throat ruined, his body shivering like it was mid-winter. It was too quiet, he was afraid Knuckle Dragger wouldn’t be entertained. The abandoned staff was taken up in the hands of the young Wanderer and the crowd hissed and whined as he sat with the staff placed on his lap.
In the young Wanderer’s ownership, that staff had seen such battering. It’d been worn ragged with splinters sticking out from the wood. The young Wanderer had taken to using these scars to his advantage. Before, the staff was most effective in stabbing, but with the splinters, it could maim. He found it best for the eyes, blinding his opponents. But stabbing because more effective as well. Bits of wood would embed themselves in his opponent’s inner workings, stabbing and tearing more and more as the man moved. Also, it just hurt more to be stabbed with the ragged spear. Wounds never cut clean, always ripped and only getting worst.
The armored man suffered this fate as soon as the man pushed to his feet. The man shuttered and wiped the slobber and vomit from his chin. The boy loomed behind him. If all gladiators weren’t perpetually alone, someone might have screamed, ‘Behind you’, but instead the boy drove the ragged staff through the man’s lower back. The shift skirted the spinal chord and burst out his belly along with his stingy, red intestines. The staff avoided the lungs completely, so the man had the ability to them into exhaustion. These actions were quick enough that it wasn’t the goring, but the scream of the armored man that silenced the crowd’s hissing.
The armored man leaned forward and gripped the staff from where it exited his lower belly. It couldn’t be known if the armored man intended to break the staff as he fell, but as the young Wanderer attempted to wrench it back out, it held secure. The force of the initial thrust and the contrasting motions of the armored man falling forward and away and the young Wanderer pulling up and back snapped the staff into splinters and jagged shards.
The armored man kicked and squirmed and was the only sound to be heard. Knuckle Dagger called down through the silence for the young Wanderer to end the suffering. He held the shattered pieces of the ragged staff and offered a pitiful look of helplessness.
“The sword, boy.” Knuckle Dagger called down from his high place.
The young Wanderer stood still, staring stupidly at the wood in his hands. He stayed in that manner until some focus outside of him, centered him. He moved without thought or intention. His fingers closed around the sword’s stupid steel and he drove the blade through the man’s neck and deep into the sand. The silence that followed was deafening.
6. The Boy
Knuckle Dagger crowded the room where he waited and his metal cub took up a fair deal as well. He was grayed, scarred and a blue magic hand. The old one’s would call it robotics, prosthetics, basically, machines. The weapon was ridiculous in such a small space or would have been for any other man. The Wanderer knew of the vicious strength Knuckle Dagger held. He knew that the walls would fall in a storm of debris. The Wanderer also knew his name was a misnomer. Smart and vicious and familiar with the Wanderer’s blade and fighting style.
“How long has it been, boy?” The Wanderer didn’t answer, he just remained behind his blade.
“Fifteen years, I ‘d bet. If not that, than sooner.” The Wanderer remained in the doorway, his blue eyes blazing with near insanity.
“I’ve been gimped for too long without satisfaction.” Dagger said, lifting his massive south paw.
“You’ve been taking good care of that, haven’t you.”
“Yes.” The Wanderer said.
“From what I heard, you still kill with the best of them. God Damn, like a force of nature.”
“Those your boys?”
“Can you tell? Yeah, not by biology though. Adoption. I’ve settled since the Bad Games. I haven’t been near Perdition for years.”
“Does it hurt less, them not being yours?”
“ Doesn’t hurt at all. My wife has a spoiled womb. She wanted the babies. She forgot, You forget, I used to kill them. She used to help me.” Dragger pointed to the blade.
“ Asking you to give me the boy would be pointless right?”
“She’s a girl. Dirty blonde, maybe fourteen. I sent my boy out to kill her. Maybe you’ll stop him. But first thing’s first.” Knuckle Dagger exploded, toward the Wanderer, into the Wanderer. The Wanderer had a second to act and he used it poorly. The sharpest thing in the world bit into Dragger’s meaty, thick hide of a shoulder, but not deep enough to stop the massive man and it wasn’t enough to stay in as the two of them crashed through the homestead wall and out into the mud and shit of a walled-in pig-pin. The sharpest thing in the world flew into the flying debris and smacked the ground with a metallic twang.
Mutated Pigs scattered away from them, squealing in terror and the Wanderer was too clumsy and confused to realize that his sword was missing, his guns were wet with pig waste and Knuckle Dragger was swinging his big cub straight at him.
The Wanderer was lifted up and dropped into the newly congregated crowd of pigs. More squealing and a handful of hooves punished his ears and body, respectively. The Wanderer limped and stumbled his way to his feet as Dragger moved through the filth. The Wanderer was on his feet and ready for the next cub strike. It sliced the space above the Wanderer’s head with a violent rush of air. He stole the time Knuckle Dragger took to recover to launch himself forward. He drove his shoulder into the monster man’s waist and the man gave up little ground. Dragger moved to grab, but the Wanderer intercepted it, jabbing at the inner wiring in the wrist controlling grip. Even as the closing hand recoiled, it’s finger s bending back ward further than would have bee n comfortable, he knew that Dragger’s metal hand would have any such weakness. The same must have occurred to Dragger because the prosthetic slammed into the Wanderer’s back seconds after the natural one failed.
The Wanderer slammed back into the shit, but he kept thinking. The man had two hands and neither have the cub. Why’d he put it down? Balance. He lost the cub when he tried to steady himself. The Wanderer’s attack was more effective than he’d imagined. The old man had some issue with either his ears or his legs. A place to start.
The Wanderer figured that the best place to attack first would be the ears. A slam to the ear, healthy or not, was distracting enough for the Wanderer to get to his blade. He could feel her calling out to him. He launched himself up and away from the oncoming danger Dragger was looking to provide. An explosion of mud and shit blew somewhere behind him, but the worst of the damage was the splatter. The Wanderer turned to his enemy, a mountain of man wheezing under a thin layer of filth.
“You tired, old man?” He asked.
“Yeah, not young like I was.” The Wanderer charged. Knuckle Dragger braced himself for another blow to the waist, but the Wanderer launched himself upward. He gained purchase on the monster man’s forearm and from there, he launched himself up by Knuckle Dragger’s shoulders. He jabbed at the man’s ear. Dragger groaned and fell away. The majority of his weight was delivered from his feet to his massive arms and his height changed very little. The Wanderer dropped down and stamped on his Achilles’ heel. Dragger roared and dropped further. When the Wanderer was satisfied that Dragger’s recovery was sufficiently hindered, he slopped forth through the filth, hearing his blades call. He climbed back into the destroyed homestead, ripped up splintered debris. His hand fell upon the cold steel of the blade as a feeling like sexual release and like near death gripped and would not let go. He crashed down upon his blade, its intentions, now, screaming in his head. The sensation ended, but the Wanderer’s muscles still twitched. A blow flipped him on his back and there Knuckle Dragger towered, shaking with some shifting mixture of pain, rage and exhortation. In his metallic hand, Dragger clutched blue arcs, dancing wildly through his fingers.
7. At his Right Hand
Applause. The young Wanderer heard slow applause. Not from many, but from one. Dragger stood and offered applause.
The young Wanderer had been summoned to view matches with Dragger, to advise in betting. The young Wanderer had broken many and could see how hurt manifested. The young Wanderer was never much for speaking, but his tongue would loosen with when killing was involved. The path to Knuckle Dragger wasn’t his stomach or his groin, it was his wallet and the young Wanderer aided in making it all the more burdensome. Though, the man and the boy had formed a lucrative relationship, Knuckle Dragger never trusted the young Wanderer. The two were never alone together, were never found without at least four armed men in toe and of course, Knuckle Dragger always had the sharpest thing in the world. She made wordless promises of safety, of happiness, of freedom. She soothed his wildness, slowed his temper. He’d seen dozens of opportunities to kill Dragger, but she reminded him of the hired murderers that Dragger had. Kill him and they’d kill the young Wanderer. Savagery is a strange thing, it protects itself from civility. It will bite the gentle hand. It will scream at the soft voice and this truth led to the deaths of two dozen fighters in the course of three days and the ultimate disobedience of the young Wanderer to his sword.
He thought he was sly. He learned in secret, how to turn skunk weeds and fermented meats into a potent poison. He slipped the poison into Dragger’s drink while a choice blow distracted the him and his man. He concealed his smile as Dragger brought the cup to his lips and his heart sank in horror as Dragger turned the cup on its side, pouring the contents out on the ground. He knew.
Dragger drew the blade with a sudo-dramatic flare and his men followed his lead, not knowing who they were preparing to killing. The young Wanderer’s mind whirled and panicked. Thousands of voices screamed in his head, each one with their own ideas of what to do next. Five men, two with guns, but if they used them, it’d be in the young Wanderer’s favor. The spectator’s box was small and he was agile. If guns started to fire, it’d be more likely that one of the five would get hit instead of him. The two gunners also had fat-headed club wrapped in barbed wire. The other two had swords, ugly ones with jagged teeth. The last and most damning problem that the young Wanderer faced was his lack of a weapon. ‘He was going to died’ he thought. Part of him liked that thought. Part of him believed that this was the freedom that the sword had promised.
“Poison...” He said in a gravelly voice. “ Disappointing. Kill, boys, kill.” The four men who stood to either of his sides erupted forth. The spectator’s box was small and the young Wanderer’s instincts were lively. A fat-headed club arced upward to strike him, but caught the ceiling, ripping some of the barbed wire loose and slowing the strike considerably. The young Wanderer evaded it the strike easily, as did he evade a jab of a sword. In the small space, he could have evade forever, he could have picked them off one by one, how clumsy their attacks were. Dragger must have figured this out because decided to open up the spectator’s box with the impossibly sharp sword. He only needed a handful of slashes to take down the wall. The young Wanderer wanted to keep it in the box, but was ripped out by the neck. The box sat ten feet above the dirt ring and the young Wanderer felt every foot once he smacked the ground. He was half-conscious and expecting to be shot now. They had the high ground, they had clear space. The young Wanderer thought that this was his day of freedom, that he would finally not be someone else’s property. The gunshots did not come. Instead, the young Wanderer heard weight pressing down on the wooden stairs. Knuckle Dragger was coming down. He was going to kill the young Wanderer like he had some many of the Wanderer’s victims. Dragger was alone, his men stood staring down at the two. The young Wanderer was sprawled out in the dust, not attempting to stand, not attempting to defend himself and Dragger was hulking with a coolness that belied his intentions. He looked as though he might help the boy up instead of shove a blade through the boy’s chest.
The young Wanderer still couldn’t think straight. His mind could only coil around the loveliness of death, but something penetrated his mind. It told his mind to stop whirling and just shut up. He couldn’t argue with it, just obey. It wanted him up, so he stood up. It wanted him to evade, so he evaded. It wanted him to attack, and he did. He launched himself into the monster man’s waist. It wanted better of him, it knew he could do better than some childish scramble. He gave it his knee. He drove his knee into the man’s crotch. Dragger fell back, sucking in shocked breaths of air. The young Wanderer charged forth, firing the stronger muscles of his leg into the man’s knee. The young Wanderer’s instincts had switched to the kill. His mind went squirrelly, he needed to move, need charge and strike. All the while, Knuckle Dragger swung the sharpest thing in the world.
Next thing was gunfire from the spectator’s box. The young Wanderer reacted by sticking close to Dragger. They’d shot carefully, or they’d shot him. The shooting did slow and Dragger demanded that it stop all together. The young Wanderer took the opportunity made by that command to Dragger’s men to strike. He shoved his foot into Dragger’s ball and taking that purchase gain, he rammed his fist into the man’s gut. The man shrank back and the sword flew from the man’s fingertips. The blade sank solidly in the ground, but far enough away that if one of Dragger’s men chose to disobey him, they’d have a clear shot at him. The young Wanderer stuck close to Dragger, evading the man’s massive hands. He attempted his best in breaking the man down, but he was strong and he wasn’t simple. The young Wanderer worked hard to keep himself close to the monster man and himself in between the man and the sword. He knew what the young Wanderer was after and what the young Wanderer was afraid of. They moved around the ring, Dragger moving slower with his worked over knee and bullocks. Dragger still had the advantage, he didn’t need to dance with the boy. His monstrously long arms could reach the child easy enough, closing his fingers around the boy was another matter. Knuckle Dragger finally did wrap his fingers around the boy and slammed him like an ape might slammed a melon against a rock. The young Wanderer was sickly still. One might think the blow had killed him, but he slowly gathering his senses. Dragger had made his way to the sword, he wrapped his fingers around the blade and the blade bit him with vicious lightening. He gasped horrible and convulsed until his massive bulk slammed against the ground with a perceivable thud.
The sword was screaming in the young Wanderer’s head, it forced him to regain his senses all at once. The sudden shock stung horribly, but he knew it was necessary. The men still in the spectator’s box still had their guns, could still shoot, but now they didn’t have to worry about hitting Dragger. The shock of Dragger dropping for no apparent reason wouldn’t save him for much longer. The young Wanderer stumbled to his feet and limped forward, moving as fast as his injured body would allow. He wrapped his fingers around the sword and it came loose with easy. He rose the blade and tasted the death he would soon deliver. Dragger blinked awake and saw the blade raised high over his head. He put his hand up in defense and lost it. The young Wanderer chopped it off and smiled as it dropped onto the monster man’s face. He was going to drive the blade down, but gunshots sounded and the young Wanderer scampered away with the blade in hand. Generally speaking the ring wasn’t easily escaped, but the sharpest thing in the world was aptly named. It carved the walls away as easily as room-temperature butter and it carved through any and every man who tried to stop him. He cut his way to freedom and those who were too slow and too afraid to get in his way had their hands full recapturing the fighters who were being housed for the oncoming fights.
8. Blue Magic
The Wanderer had rarely seen blue magic, a lot of the old things were dead to these times, so it came to reason that the Wanderer wouldn’t have many effective defenses against such a potent attack. Dragger lifted the young man up with his natural hand, high off the ground and well away from his mistress’s call. His mind whirled in frustration as he commanded his arms and legs to act and they under-performed for him.
Knuckle Dragger’s metallic hand made a low, crackling whine as the blue arcs grew. Dragger slammed the fist into the Wanderer’s chest in an explosion of blue, jerky flame. The Wanderer crashed in an eruption of dark brown, back into the shit. This injury did more good than harm for the Wanderer. The jolt sent burning adrenaline through the Wanderer’s veins and forced his limbs to regain their lost strength. The first task was to get to his feet. That task was simple enough, the lightening firing over head made it more difficult, but not impossible. The Wanderer made the journey to standing and fell in time to miss another streak of blue lightening. With his limbs perform to some usable degree, his mind turned to the blue magic hand. Dragger hadn’t hit him with the lightening, not at a distance. The Wanderer was a sitting target and it didn’t matter, why? Possibly because Dragger couldn’t aim lightening. Overhead, in the stormy, night skies, lightening appeared to be untamed, maybe this was something similar. Like any other elemental force, one might make use of it, but would be killed if ever they tried to master it. His philosophizing was wasted neurons fired, all he needed to know was that Dragger needed to be close to make use of his blue magic. The Wanderer picked himself up and hobbled to the furthest moment point to the pig-pen. More lightening dancing overhead, this time licking the air near him, but not ever landing. This new information didn’t revealed a new problem. Dragger couldn’t hit him with the lightening from a distance, but the Wanderer couldn’t end this from a distance either. He removed a gun from his hip and toyed with the idea that it somehow evaded damage. That somehow one of the bullets had stayed dry, but holding the weapon confirmed that it’d need cleaning and repair soon. He then thought of the last refuge of desperate gun men, throwing one’s gun. Hefting the shooting iron would make for a fair distraction and the other would make for a fair club. He didn’t like the idea because that idea was also a fair betray of his loyal shooters. He apologized as his launched the gun at Dragger, As it flew, the Wanderer charged with half clumsy footsteps and closed the gap with his other iron drawn and gripped about the muzzle. He launched himself into the air and back up the path he blazed prior.
Dragger had taken the bait and attempted to shoot at the twirling gun. It landed harmlessly, but the other iron connected with Dragger’s temple. He stumbled backward, but keep his balance, The Wanderer struck again and again, roaring viciously. Each blow he landed dropped the monster man another inch or so and each blow welcomed the little savage that he tried to leave behind in the blood spattered rings of the Bad Games.
Knuckle Dragger finally fell, his large half crushing the Wanderer in the fall. Dragger crashed face first into the shit, but still wasn’t dead. Shallow bubbling noises sounded from his mouth, which was half-submerged under the brown filth. The discomfort of being half-submerged and therefore, utilizing only half of his breathing capacity, might have brought the old monster man around, but by that time, the Wanderer had his blade clutched in his hands and drawn to end the old man’s life.
“It would be quick.” Dragger said breathlessly.
“If I wanted it to be.”
“It’d have to be if you want that girl you’re after.” This was true. A single killing swipe would have been necessary, but Dragger deserved more. The fire in his belly, which had been reawakened, demanded better. A single killing blow seemed pity, so the Wanderer didn’t take it.
“How do I find your boy?”
“Slaughterhouse most likely. I didn’t tell him where to go, but it makes sense he’d be there. You’ll find it easy, just sniff for the blood.”
The Wanderer was off, soaked in shit and chewed up by Dragger’s blue magic.
The slaughterhouse was like the homestead in that it looked like it should have been torn down, except the slaughterhouse had the add charms of the pig-pin. The shabby structure stank of shit and noxious chemicals. The Wanderer noted a drain ditch which jutted out from one end of the slaughterhouse and thought of the water he drank back in town. He waved the thought away. He figured that the Perkins place was far enough away from the well in the tavern that it’d be impossible for seepage into the water table to occur. Otherwise, he’d be dead by now.
The structure was quiet, but not the dead quiet the Wanderer had feared. Be it his impossibly sharp sword, which he believed it was, or be it his honed sense, but he could feel the difference. She was still alive because something in her that the Wanderer couldn’t hear, touch or see was far too noisy. The Wanderer crept forth into the slaughterhouse and listened for the inevitable reaction. It didn’t come and the Wanderer questioned if the last Perkins had expected he would need to kill the girl. From past pigs, spit open and hung from the neck on rusted iron hook, and past leaking barrels of something black like crude oil, a whimper sounded. The whimper came from behind strong fingers and was out of terror and not defiance.
The floor was slick will fresh blood, the first of the Perkins had it on his hands. The blood wasn’t everywhere though and where it wasn’t told the Wanderer where the two hid. Two pairs of feet led to the very back. A narrow passage which probably fed the pigs from the pen had been purposefully and in artfully concealed by a few over-turned barrels.
Low and behold, those barrels were cast aside and there, in the stink of shit and black blood, did the last Perkins and the Perkins’ purchase cower. The last Perkins, a smaller copy of the first, with big, bloodshot eyes and a sunken jaw, struggled to do up his pants and crab walk down the passageway at the same time. It seemed that both activities demanded both hands to do, so he got nowhere with either.
The girl, on the other hand, just curled herself in a ball, so as to conceal her half-exposed and blood-burned flesh. She had once been wearing a flower-pattern dress, but that had been ripped to shreds in the last Perkins’ haste. She also had a complete of cuts on her, cross-hatching along her shoulders and back. The Wanderer noticed that some might grow gangrenous without attention.
The Wanderer drew his sword and stopped the progress of the last Perkins. The blade just tapped the crest of the man’s lip and that was enough to draw blood. The blood didn’t bother the man at all, his attention was focused on the long blade, thirst for more.
“Take off your shirt. Give it to the girl.” The last Perkins did as he was told, make nervous whimpers as he did so. He tossed the sweat stained shirt over the girl’s bare shoulders and backed away from her as quick as he could.
“Now go see to your daddy. I’m coming back to kill. I’m doing it right once I get the time to.” The man just sat there, with his gaze going stupider and stupider by the moment. Finally, the Wanderer repeated the command while pulling the man to his feet. He still stalled in the dull light of the slaughterhouse, but soon enough his mind sped up with the current events. His siblings were dead, his adopted father wasn’t and neither was he. The man that had done the killing had given him a reprieve and that reprieve was dwindling with every second he wasted. The last Perkins boy ran from the slaughterhouse, his pants improperly buttoned and falling around his legs.
The Wanderer knelt by the girl as she shivered and rocked back and forth. He knew that she was terrified, that rough hands spiriting her away against her will would do far more harm than good, but the Wanderer had little choice. He wasn’t the codling type and he had miles and miles to go before he slept. He had money to make and people to kill.
9. The Red Convoy
The girl had stayed close-mouth, though she was clearly terrified of the Wanderer. This condition was frustrating to say the least. The Wanderer was after a convoy of red-covered wagons which the girl would have come out of. There were literally thousands of them, selling children wholesale. He’d found and broken up a total of seventeen in his time and he was eager for his eighteenth, the one she came off of. Because she continued to remain mute, he had to revert to forcibly carrying her. The first order of business became cleaning her wounds. The Wanderer expected he was a little ways behind the convoy and he couldn’t have her dying on him along the way. He needed clean water and clean rags. The most obvious place was the tavern, the Perkins place might have had a pump of its own, but he wouldn’t trust the ground water away here. Beside that concern, the last Perkins might have gain some balls with the addition of a gun. He could kill him easy, he could possible kill Dragger in the state he was in, but he wasn’t adept at protecting someone else while doing so.
The Wanderer made his way down the town’s lonesome road with the blonde girl, swaddled in the last Perkins’ shirt. She was a skinny thing with long limbs spilling out from his arms. She might have been close to his height, but he can’t have been sure, since he had never seen her standing.
She shivered terribly and crying continually. Her muscles were tense with her unfulfilled intention to fight with him. As the Wanderer moved up the stairs into the tavern and placed the girl on a table in a far corner. The dog-faced barmaid with the P E R K I on her breast pocket made to protest his filth and her bleeding nudity, but she recognized the girl and attempted to shrink down into nothing. Her face was pale and sickly as the Wanderer clicked a silver piece on the countertop and demanded another pitcher of water and some clean towels.
“Now!” He barked when she stared stupidly at him. She flopped a hand full of cotton towels on the countertop and moved to the pump behind the bar. She dropped the pitcher on the floor the first time she attempted to fill it, but had better luck the second time. She filled the pitcher and handed it over. The Wanderer kept his back turned to the woman as she moved away toward the porch, where the elder bull man still slumbered with his bowling ball betwixt his legs. The Wanderer gingerly dabbed at the girl’s wounds, wiping away the filth as she shivered like the rape victim she was. Once her wounds were cleaned, the Wanderer started on the uncut flesh with a new towel. The damage wasn’t as horrible as he had feared, but it easily could have been.
The girl shrunk away from the cold water and made whimpering sounds, but the Wanderer worked on her, she seemed to relax her muscles. Maybe it was fatigue and maybe it was trust, but the Wanderer doubted the ladder.
Lastly, the Wanderer made crude bandages with the last of the towels. He managed to appeal a few of them before the ball who launched.
As per his instincts, he launched himself away from the path of the ball, but recanted to snatch the girl out of harm’s way. The ball punched a hole through the wall and then rushed back along the path it came to rest in the hands of the old bull man. His face was still pallid from his sleep and Ma Perkins, the bar maid hid behind him. The girl had started howling on the ground, which drew the bowler’s attention. The ball flew with its chain snaking behind it and the Wanderer intercepted the strike with the edge of his sword. The Wanderer slashed the ball and a hefty chunk of the marble crashed down onto the ground, splitting again into two pieces. The bowler returned the ball to him and gave a grimace to his injured weapon. The girl wasted little time after her salvation. She got open and started toward the door. The bowler launched the ball again and instead of hitting her, it passed her. The girl became tripped up in the bowler’s chain nevertheless and she smacked the floor with an ugly thud. As the returned to its master, the Wanderer charged and managed to knick the ball from its chain. With no control over the cut sphere, the bowler sidestepped the ball and started at the Wanderer with the chain.
His whirled the chain overhead in widening arcs, creating a circle of protection. The chain whined and clanked as it sliced through the air. The Wanderer mimicked the motion with his sword, managing better with figure-eights in the air in front of his body. He charged forward and as the chain descended to strike, it broke appear into several pieces. Each piece launched itself into a different direction like shrapnel. The bowler still had maybe a foot and a half of the chain, but he also had the Wanderer’s blade on his neck. A small display of mercy, if the old man would take it. The old man dropped the chain.
“What’s your name, boy?” The old man asked, raising his hands into view.
“Clod.” The Wanderer said in almost a croak.
“I’ll remember that.” The old man said, his eyes trained on the blade as it left his neck. The Wanderer sheathed his blade and picked the girl up by the arm. She was still sobbing, though she didn’t fight his grip.
He stepped out onto the porch where Ma Perkins had escaped to at some point in the fight. She shrank backward into the street, her face going paler and paler. She was a bleached skull by the time she stood on the street and tears where traveling down her cheeks.
“My boys. Are they all gone?” She asked with a quiver choking her voice.
“Not all.” He said and moved on down the road.